The following are all replies on a similar discussion on another message board:
We do that all the time here at work. The only thing is that it is pretty slow. Generally on the current range of mobile phones you only get a connection speed of about 9.6 kbps connection speed, therefore making browsing/email fairly expensive.
Im not sure what brand of mobile you are using, but with the Nokia's all you need is whats called the "Nokia Data Suite", which is a CD with some software and a cable which connects your phone into one of the COM ports on the back of the laptop. I bought a few of them quite some time ago and back then they were about $190 each, more than likey that price would have gone up by now.
The other thing you can do is to connect your mobile phone using the Infrared port on the laptop, providing that your phone has IR capabilities aswell. It tends to be pretty unreliable unless you have it sitting on a flat surface that doesnt move. The cable does exactly the same thing and you should have no problems with that.
I haven't tried it with the laptop yet, but I am able to connect to the net using a Palm Vx and a Nokia 8250 with the IR ports. The phone has an internal fax modem, so I just point the Palmpilot at the phone and it dials in much the same way your computer does. It connects at 14.4kbps which is quite okay for simple web surfing and e-mail. I'll give it a go on the laptop soon as well and let you know. As far as I am aware (and please correct me if I'm wrong), the phone's internal modem is a part of the GSM standard and therefore the Nokia Data Suite isn't necessary if you have an IR capable laptop and phone. The Palmpilot required no additional software to dial, I just told it to use an external modem connected via infrared.
Mobile phones will only connect at or below a speed of 9600 baud. Very slow for net access. The nokia data suite is actually free from the nokia web site. If indeed you have a nokia phone and compatible equipment. I use a nokia 8210 with infrared connect (via IR) to a toshiba notebook computer. In effect the phone is the modem.
You must make sure that you have a "data" line connected to your service. Normal mobile lines are not capable of transmitting computer data.
All in all i find it to be a pretty successfull waste of time.
Also, if you dont have an IR port on the notebook or phone ( most notebooks have IR these days, and i think all nokia have IR)then you will need to get hold of the data cable for the respective phone.
It is possible to get 14.4k if your phone is HSCSD (high speed circuit switched data) compatible.
Not a lot of phones are HSCSD compatable at the moment but the next step is GPRS which is available in the phone networks now with data rates of 40 to 120kB depending on other network traffic. There are a few GPRS phones around at the moment, Nokia ones to hit the market shortly. These make mobile data traffic a bit more realistic. Next step after that is 3G mobile networks with data rates of up to 2MBit to the Mobile (some stringent conditions apply to get this), available in around 2 years.
On the Palm Vx I went into Preferences/Connection/New, and set Connection Method to 'IrCOMM to Modem', Dialing TouchTone, Speed 14,400 bps.
Then, under Prefs/Network I setup a service for my ISP using the Connection I just created.
To actually use the net, I downloaded a program called MsgAgent for e-mail and Palmscape for WWW. There is also a program called 'Fax' which is nifty if you ever have the urge to send a fax on the run using the phone's faxmodem.
With that setup, all I have to do if I want to check e-mail or surf the web is turn on the phone's IR reception, point them at each other and tap connect on the Palm.
I imagine there would be some differences between the Palm V and III, but you should be able to do it without buying anything. Have you checked out the Software downloads on the Palm site, and also
http://www.tucows.com ?