Archive for the 'Mobile Internet' Category

The Register reports that from next month, T-Mobile will introduce a new tariff that allows people to use VOIP on their phones.

Ahead of next week’s announcements, The Register has learned Web ‘n’ Walk Max will have a 10GB data limit and no restrictions on VoIP or instant messaging use. It’ll cost consumer punters £22.50 as a standalone product and £44 for suits, who get voice bundled in.

Also new will be Web ‘n’ Walk plus, which provides 3GB without VoIP, but with instant messaging allowed.

Standard Web ‘n’ Walk, as available now, will remain unchanged at £7.50 for 1GB. Instant messaging will be allowed for light users too.

I was already planning to switch when my Vodafone contract runs out at the end of this year so I could surf on my phone. This news provides an interesting new option. I’ve been mucking around with WengoPhone, which is like Skype but uses the open SIP standard. They already have a mobile client, but it’s for Windows smart phones, which I definitely won’t get. Hopefully they’ll put together a J2ME version soon.

Can anyone recommend a SDK for J2ME on Linux? I want to try out a few things but getting started doesn’t appear to be as easy as it does with J2SE. I need the standard Java stuff as well as some sort of phone emulator.

Sun’s Toolkit needs Windows XP, as does Sony Ericsson’s. I’ve tried IBM’s WebSphere Everyplace Micro Environment, but when I start the emulator it keeps complaining about font paths. Even when I do fix the font paths it just displays the error message in a different font!

Is there a simple SDK out there?

John Carmack is making mobile phone games these days. His current one is an RPG called Orcs and Elves. It looks pretty cool:

so I figured I’d give it a go. It’s a mobile phone game so I thought I should be able to get it pretty quickly, how wrong I was. I couldn’t buy it directly off ID, it’s being published by EA Mobile. No problem I go to their site, there it is for $2.99, I click Buy Now. I’m then told I need to select my mobile provider, but it only lists American ones. I’m on the American site, so I switch the to UK one. Orcs and Elves is nowhere to be found, at least on the front page. I use their game finder, which requires me to select my provider. I select Vodafone, it brings me to a page that tells me I need to go to the Vodafone website on the web or on my phone. They can’t even tell me which EA games are available through Vodafone.

I go to the Vodafone games site. I can’t see Orcs and Elves, and they force me to find games by browsing by phone model and type of game. I try the search, it comes up with nothing. I’m not sure if it searches the games, so I try searching for their current top game, FIFA 2006. There’s one result and it directs me to this page (a 404 for those too lazy to click). Clearly their search is broken so I end up browsing, thankfully there’s an EA category, because the Action/Adventure has 11 pages to browse through.

End result? They don’t have it. They do have Doom RPG, ID’s first attempt at a mobile game, which has good reviews, but I’m not that interested in a turn based version of Doom. Even if I was it costs £5.00, three times more than I could buy the newer game if I was in America! Why is getting a hold of this game so difficult? I don’t buy it in a shop, I don’t get a CD, I get it off the Internet, and with a phone connected to the Internet I should be able to get it virtually anywhere. But instead I’m forced to wait for my mobile provider to get it, then get charged a huge markup because I’m in the UK and can only get it through them.

I hope this isn’t a sign of how the mobile Internet is going to work for all media.

I’ve been using Google Calendar for a few weeks now. It’s a great piece of software, and the first computer based calendar that has stopped me from updating my paper diary. If you haven’t tried it yet, check it out.

Here are some tips from Google’s new Visual Design Lead, who I believe has some input into Google Calendar.

Another tool worth checking out is GCalSync, which can synchronise your Google Calendar with your phone’s calendar. It’s still early days, but it imported most of my events, but it did struggle with the reoccurring ones. If they get this working well, that signals the end of my paper diary!

I’ve been on holiday for the past week and had no access to a computer, let alone Internet access. I wanted to check my email so I figured I’d give the three email clients I previously tried a more serious test. Pegasus was the one I tried first. It connected to my mail server, which was better than last time, but it just managed to show me the directory structure of my IMAP inbox. It failed to show me any messages. I tried it on a few other occassions but it failed every time, so it was soon deleted.

Next up was Movamail. Once configured Movamail is a nice mail client, it’s quick and can display a lot on the screen. It also has the additional benefit of preprocessing your emails to strip out irrelevant information and sending them as a compressed batch to ease those high GPRS costs. Writing email is also a pleasant enough experience, with the client taking advantage of the phone’s predictive text editor. It also builds up an addressbook of people you send to, but it doesn’t tie into the phone’s address book, which in the K750’s case, has space for email addresses. There were downsides that did spoil the experience:

• The stripping was sometimes too clever and if the author of the email does horrendous quoting, you could end up with a blank email.
• CC’ing people (actually myself so I’d have a copy of the email) just didn’t work.
• After upgrading the software the next email that was sent out had one of the messages from my inbox appended to it.

It’s that’s last point that really killed Movamail for me. I really don’t need my email client sending out private messages to whomever. Even after my testing showed it was a one off I refused to use Movamail to send emails, and used the K750’s built in email client instead. Movamail did prove to be a very good email reader, but for $29.99/year, I’d like a program I could be confident to send mail with too.

Their website appears to have been setup once and been left, i.e. there’s no information on active development, unlike Pegasus, which has a blog. I will report the problem to Movamail at the support address on their site.

One other gripe with Movamail is the amateurish feel of their operation. There’s no company information on their website, and payments are done through PayPal. As far as I can tell they are backed by Tehāma Ventures Inc. so at a guess I’d say it’s mostly programmers at this point and the company still needs to be fleshed out.

A more long term problem is lack of a decent SSL setup with my email account. I changed passwords when I got back to be on the safe side. I guess one possible setup is, before I go on holiday, start forwarding my email to another address, e.g. gmail, then download from their server, which should have a proper SSL setup that will work with phone clients.

I’ll have to see how these two clients evolve. Movamail has it’s problems, but it worked in the field. These upcoming Pegasus features sound like it’ll match Movamail:

PUSH Email (Only available in PRO version): PUSH messaging. Let email finds you, you never have to poll your mail server again. Streaming Email™ (Only available in PRO version) Patented Mail-Download-on-Demand feature saves cost on data usage and delivers the fastest mobile mail experience.

but I’ll have to get it to read my email first! I have no trips planned for a while so let’s hope both can improve in the meantime.

I’m posting this while sitting on a train from Brighton to London using T-Mobile HotSpot. To be honest I’m quite amazed, it’s a pretty decent Internet connection. I had tried it before but never managed to get it to work, but this time it just did. It makes me wonder if they always have it on or not.

I just signed up for 60 minutes, which is pretty expensive at £5, but for the regular commuter there are more reasonable monthly packages.

Now all I need is a London wide wifi network and I’ll be happy.

T-Mobile now has an add on called web ‘n’ walk, which gives you unlimited Internet access from your phone. The prices on their site are bundled with phone controls, but George Wright has got the actual prices. £ 7.50 if you don’t use your phone as a modem, £10 if you do. A lot more reasonable than Vodafone’s £2.35 per megabyte! Shame my contract doesn’t run out until the end of the year. At least Sony Ericsson’s K800 will be out by then and should be down to a reasonable price.

Another bargain is their Web’n'Walk Professional, which is a 3G data card with unlimited access (2GB fair use limit), and they chuck in 12 months free access with their T-Mobile HotSpot wireless network (it’s all over London) for £19.99 a month. Very tempting.

I think my ideal setup would be a 3G phone with unlimited access that I could use as a modem with my laptop as well as access to their HotSpot network. Then mobile Internet access could actually become a reality.

Since my last foray into mobile email, I’ve given a few different email clients a go:

• MovaMail - Mobile Mail
• Pegasus (nothing to do with the old Pegasus Mail Client)

MovaMail

MovaMail is an interesting mail client because rather than contacting your mail server directly, they have a proxy that strips out excess headers and attachments and compresses it before downloading to your phone. This makes it very quick and lowers the costs of data transfer. An interesting idea but you have to be comfortable with another company having your mail server login details as well as processing your mail. Their FAQ tries to alleviate some fears:

Q. Is my email information secure? A. Yes. Your account information is encrypted, and stored on our servers which are in a secured network centre with restricted access. Your account is password protected as well. Please note that in order to retrieve lost passwords you must provider your mobile phone number so that lost passwords can me sent to your phone via SMS.

Q. Is my information secure with Mobile Mail? A. Yes. Data security is a high priority to us. Your password is stored encrypted on our servers. Our servers are located in a secured facility with access only by authorized personnel.

Q. What is you privacy policy? A. We are firmly committed to respecting your privacy. We do not share your information with any third party without your prior consent. If you have any questions, please review our privacy policy.

Overall I quite like the client, there are only a few annoyances. First the text is quite small, but that does have the advantage of allowing you to see more. If you have a larger inbox, each time you want to access the next ‘page’ of headers, it contacts the server, it doesn’t cache the headers. It’s impossible to change the mail server settings once you’ve entered time, so make sure you get them right or you’ll be in for a lot of tedious typing.

Pegasus

Pegasus is definitely the more attractive of the two clients:

and has a lot more features, e.g. attachment viewing. The Pro version has a push option so you don’t need to check the server, and streaming, which apparently saves on data transfer. The interface is better than Movamail and I really wanted to like it, but I couldn’t get it to talk to my mail server, it always hung on the connecting screen, so I can’t really say a lot more.

Both clients support SSL, but I couldn’t get it to work. I assume it’s the same problem as I had with the internal client where I need to install the SSL certificate. Further research suggests this is only possible via Bluetooth or IRDA, neither of which I have setup on my laptop, in fact I don’t even have Bluetooth on my laptop, so this is going to be a struggle if I want to use email on my phone on a regular basis.

Movamail and Pegasus are commercial software, to be honest I don’t know if I’d use my phone for email enough to warrant buying one after the trials end. On the odd occassion I need to check my mail, the built-in client is good enough, but for someone who uses their phone as their main email client, both these programs are worth a look.

I just came across Google Maps for your phone. What’s even better is that it’s integrated with local search. It’s pretty slick, it has the same scrolling and zooming ease of the web version, very easy to use. Only hitch is that it currently only covers the US. The map detail of London isn’t at street level yet.

This could be a really useful bit of kit. The next step would be to get some sort of GPS in there so it immediately knows where you are on the map. Phones already have some location information from what ever base station they’re connected to.

My main concern is the amount of data that gets transferred. It’s quick so I assume they’ve got the image size right down, but at £2.35 a meg, it’s not going to be small enough. It would be great if you could predownload maps for a given area, e.g. London, over a regular connection, then upload it to your phone.

Combining playing with GMM and all the mail programs I’ve been trying out, maybe it’s time to start looking for a unlimited data plan. I’m guessing I’d have to switch from Vodafone since when I popped into their store I had this ridiculous conversion:

Me: I’m using a lot of GPRS with my phone

Shop guy: Yeah that’s really expensive

Me: I noticed that, is it possible to prebuy a bundle of MB for a lower price?

Shop guy: You mean like a data pack?

Me: That sounds like it.

Shop guy: No, we don’t do that.

What I want has a name, but doesn’t exist, madness.

I actually came across the correct settings for Vodafone GPRS while trying to use my phone as a modem. I was away over Easter and had my laptop, but my only Internet connection was a vain hope there would be a public wireless connection around. There weren’t any, and surprisingly all the ones I did find were encryptyed.

It was annoying to see wireless connections around but not being able to connect. I figured if I couldn’t get a permanent solution like a 3G datacard or a monthly subscription to T-Mobile HotSpot, then I’d have to fall back to the old trusty dial up. There is a modem built into the Thinkpad T30, but I’ve never bothered to set it up. I figure if there is a phone line, there’s going to be some sort of broadband connection. The modem I wanted to use was in my phone, the main driver being I had a load of bundled minutes with it and what better way to use them than downloading email at 9.6kbps?

But before I could find out if I could even be old fashioned and dial up to Freeserve (or what ever they’re called now) I remembered about GPRS, which should give me a data rate of about 25-40kbps. I found some instructions how to use a Sony Ericsson phone as a GPRS modem in Linux. These particular instructions use Bluetooth, something my T30 doesn’t have, but you can connect using the supplied USB cable as well. After you plug in your phone load the following drivers:

• cdc_acm
• ppp
• ppp_deflate
• bsd_comp

The first driver should create a device at /dev/ttyACM0, the others are to allow you to dial up and use PPP. So ignore the first step in the instructions above (unless of course you’re using Bluetooth). Then in the first file change the device to /dev/ttyACM0, and make sure you have the correct user (’web’ for Vodafone). My copy of /etc/ppp/chat.gprs contains:

TIMEOUT         5
SAY             "Internet via Vodafone GPRS"
ABORT           'nBUSYr'
ABORT           'nERRORr'
ABORT           'nNO ANSWERr'
ABORT           'nNO CARRIERr'
ABORT           'nNO DIALTONEr'
ABORT           'nRINGINGrnrRINGINGr'
''              rAT
TIMEOUT         12
OK              ATE1
OK              AT+cgdcont=1,"IP","internet"
OK              ATD*99***1#
CONNECT         ''

and finally in /etc/ppp/pap-secrets set the username and password to what ever your provider requires. Then you can connect with:

pppd chat gprs

and amazingly you’re connected to the Internet. Maybe I’m too cynical about technology these days, but I was amazed how easy this was to setup.