IMac/Verizon Mobile Hotspot on Phone connection issues?

Hello! New here. Hope this is a good place to put this. Hopefully someone can help me out

Basically, I just got an iMac. Computer of my dreams... It's amazing. I decided immediately to switch everything from my old MacBook Pro which was my primary computer.
The iMac runs Lion. My MacBook pro ran Snow Leopard. Maybe not important. Anyway, my phone is an iPhone 4 with all current upgrades.

The first night I tried to connect the iPhone to the iMac and it said I needed at least iTunes 10.6. It's running 10.4. Funny enough my MacBook ran 10.5.
We live in the country so I don't have actual Internet. I use Verizon's mobile hotspot on my iPhone. It connects just fine to my other macs. I tried to connect the iMac and it works for about 2 minutes then seems to time out. So I can't download anything.

I'm not running 4G or anything either which seemed to be a problem for others. Plain ol 3G. I don't get spectacular service but it has always worked for my laptops and didn't cut out often.

Has anyone else had this problem and managed to fix it? I plan to bring this up to Verizon.

Alternatively, is there any way to get iTunes other than from the Internet? I tried to take the software from my MacBook but it said I couldnt edit the software.