Well, that didn’t take long. Just a few hours after the rumor broke that the “Personal Hotspot” feature Verizon was throwing around at their iPhone announcement yesterday was in fact a standard feature of iOS 4.3, Apple has just pushed an early copy of iOS 4.3 out to developers — and sure enough, it looks like Personal Hotspot is baked right in.
The first spotting came from Twitter user TheJamesFoley, who managed to get iOS 4.3 installed on his device in damn-near no time. His device isn’t jailbroken, and is on a GSM carrier (Three UK).. and yet there it is, clear as day: the Personal Hotspot option, chillin’ out in the settings panel like it ain’t no thing.
We’ll still have to see which carriers choose to support the feature, though it’s unclear whether the carriers can choose to support tethering/personal hotspot independently or if the two features are attached at the hip.