[FlamingCobra]

Since you can hook up a computer to a TV and use the TV as a monitor, then can you hook up a mobile device to the computer and use the computer's hardware to interface with that mobile device?

[headdie]

It depends on the phone.  the manual that came with it should give some clues as to what you can do and if a disk came with the phone stick it in the pc and see what options you can use.  for example i can use my Nokia to simulate the mouse and keyboard on my pc over the bluetooth not that i really want to that often.

most phones will have the option to upload any non default sound, image or video file to the pc and there are usually codecs on the internet for any proprietary video format to allow you to run them on the pc

[FlamingCobra]

what I'm basically asking is, if your institution has content control on the internet, can you hook up a mobile phone to the computer and use it as a wireless modem... thing?

[headdie]

Again it depends on the phone and your provider but as a H3G customer I can and I am doing so now as I have burned my data allowance for the month on my mobile broadband account.

[MP-Ryan]

what I'm basically asking is, if your institution has content control on the internet, can you hook up a mobile phone to the computer and use it as a wireless modem... thing?

It's called tethering, and some phones are capable of doing it, but it also depends on the phone's wireless plan.  Unless it's explicitly included in the plan, tethering is not always considered part of the plan's data usage, and additional (and highly exorbitant) data charges may apply.

Check your phone, and check the plan you're on.

Most recent Blackberries and Android devices can do this, and the iPhone is capable of acting as a wifi access point.  If you have a smartphone newer than 3+ years old, it's almost guaranteed to be capable of doing this from a hardware standpoint; the limitation will be the wireless plan, and (in the case of the iPhone's AP functionality) having a wireless NIC in the computer.