Apple prototyping "iPhone lite" and MacBook Mini / media pad for Verizon?

[Via TUAW; image courtesy of Frunny]
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It seems almost criminal that Mac users have been thus far denied the basic human right to tether the immensely popular BlackBerry 8700 series devices to their Macbooks, but thanks to a little elbow grease, determination, and nearly $700 in cold, hard cash, the world's wrongs have been righted. An intrepid character by the name of Daniel Pasco has claimed the bounty offered by Alex King, challenging folks to come up with a solution for using an 8700 as a Mac OS X compatible modem. So far, Mr. Pasco's solution has apparently been verified with the 8700g on T-Mobile and the 8703e on Verizon and Sprint, though we imagine Cingular's would work just the same. In the short term, it looks like the rough cut of the software will be available only to people that had contributed to the reward, but the solution will hopefully find its way into the public domain down the road.
We've still yet to hear of any
solid 3G ExpressCard device releases as yet (we were kind of hoping CTIA would have yielded at least one or two), but
Om seems to have the scoop on a Novatel EV-DO ExpressCard 34 launch for May -- whose most obvious application right now
is, of course in Apple MacBook Pros. Granted, we wouldn't be in
this predicament if Apple had just followed through with internal integrated 3G like so many other laptop manufacturers,
but hey, you've got what we've got, and we'll takes what we can gets. There's no way of knowing, however, when the
cards will hit the market with Sprint or Verizon even if Novatel launches their card in May, so stay tuned.








