Hi all,

As we all know, the N900 is a pretty neat device, but one deficiency it has with respect to Nokia's Symbian phones is that it doesn't provide any visual feedback when a tethered data connection is in use.

I noticed this early on, but after Jan Zbytovský commented on the bluetooth-dun page that there was no way to tell if it was in use, I decided to take a look at whether it was possible to write a suitable monitoring applet.

And it turns out that it is possible, by poking at various semi-documented DBus interfaces, and so I've stuck my initial attempt into extras-devel.

It's able to detect that a data connection has been started, stopped or suspended (eg: if you answer a call while using gprs/edge). The mechanism for detecting that a data connection is not tethered (being used by the phone itself) is not perfect but should work for anyone who doesn't have more than one APN.

In this initial version, the plugin always shows an icon (dimmed when no connection is in use) but I think it's preferable to show no icon at all when there's no connection, so I'll probably take it out in the next iteration.

Here's the package page:

http://maemo.org/packages/view/tethermon

Feedback is always welcome.

Enjoy!