Archive for the 'Mobile Internet' Category

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:

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.

I saw an advert recently that Vodafone has started a flat rate plan for their 3G datacards. The ad said £45 a month but the price plan says £52.88. And it works in Linux. At the moment I use my computers either at home or at work so £52.88 is a bit steep for the odd occasion when I take my laptop somewhere but if you’re a contractor, it becomes a lot more attractive, especially if you have it instead of broadband at home. But then again 384kb/s vs. 8mb/s, would you really want to? Now where are those 4G cards…

Update: Just saw the ad again, which still says it’s only £45 a month, and the small print says ‘1GB fair use limit’. So it’s not unlimited at all, it’s a 1GB plan. Dodgy advertising if you ask me.