Email on a Sony Ericsson K750i
This is the first of a two part post on mobile Internet access. I’ve looked at it before but having an unlimited 3G datacard from Vodafone (actually it looks like 1GB/month fair use limit) is just too expensive for the limited travel I do. Having been at Heathrow airport on Friday evenings it looks like Blackberries are the way to go. But frankly I don’t want to carry something else around, nor do I want to have another suscription. My phone seems capable to do everything so I figure why not use it to check my email?
Before looking into too many J2ME email clients I noticed that it has email support built in! It’s in the ‘Messaging’ section, under the deceptively named ‘Email’ icon. Setting it up is like any other email program, enter your server details, username, password, etc. What I was amazed at was that it has IMAP4 support as well as being able to encrypt it with SSL or TLS. Very fancy. Of course it didn’t work, it hung while trying to find the server. I figured it was flaking IMAP or SSL support and just forgot about it, but finally I figured out why it wasn’t working.
The problem was the WAP settings I got from the Vodafone website. They’re simply wrong:
| APN | Username | Password | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vodafone website | wap.vodafone.co.uk | wap | wap |
| Actual settings | internet | web | web |
You need to create a new GPRS account in your Data Comms section, then change your Internet profile to use that. After that, it can connect fine. It’s also worth turning on the compression options given the high costs of GPRS (~£2.50/MB).
Well almost…it now fails with an SSL error. I’m guessing that it’s because the SSL certificate for my mail server is issued to my ISP and hence generates an error message. But on the K750 I don’t get the option to okay it. I decided against trying it without SSL for now because I’m not a fan of sending out clear text passwords. In the certificates part of the Internet settings there’s no option to upload a certificate, but there’s bound to be away to get around this given that the phone is just a USB drive when I connect it to my laptop.
The other options are a different mail client, or something insane like pine over a J2ME ssh client.
April 19th, 2006 at 8:57 am
Do you recommend the Sony Ericsson K750i? I am looking for a new phone at the moment and the K750i was one of the phones I was looking at. I currently have an early generation Sony Ericsson.
Do you know what platform it runs?
April 19th, 2006 at 9:23 am
It’s a nice little phone. It took a while to get used to it, but my last phone was an old Nokia, so it’s not that surprising. My only complaints would be that the case is a bit plasticky for my liking, and the little joystick in the middle does become less sensitive over time.
No idea what platform it runs, I guess some proprietary Sony Ericsson one. I don’t think you can install any native applications anyway. It supports Java, so you can use that if you’re in the mood to write some software for your phone. It works very nicely with Linux and shows up as a standard USB drive (the memory stick is just another directory within the phone after you mount it) and its modem is supported. At some point I also want to give KMobileTools a try to see if I can sync up my phone book with the address book on my laptop.
If you can hang about, the Sony Ericsson W950i looks interesting from a tech point of view. It’s a ’smartphone’ that runs Symbian 9.1, but isn’t too clunky.
May 6th, 2006 at 5:26 pm
[…] Since my last foray into mobile email, I’ve given a few different email clients a go: […]