IMPORTANT: Update The Mail Settings On Your Nokia Phone Symbian
Lora Ceasor
With Google withdrawing its Java-based Gmail client from general circulation and with no guarantees that it'll carry on working, many S60 3rd Edition phone owners will be looking at other ways of getting their Gmail fix. The most obvious solution is one that many of us have avoided for several years, with memories of the first few iterations of Nokia Email (ne Messaging) still shrieking horrors in our minds. But, with a few caveats, Nokia Email now works surprisingly well - it's certainly worth giving it another chance. Here's a walkthrough and a few tips/pointers.
With the demise of the official Google Gmail client however, I thought I'd take another look at Nokia Email/Messaging - since its introduction two years ago, the client has been updated many times and is quite a bit more efficient and more forgiving. I was testing it on the QVGA-screened Nokia N86, typical of the breed of S60 3rd Edition smartphones which haven't been able to benefit from having an equivalent system baked into their firmwares (as, for example, the Symbian^3 devices have). If the N86 can run Nokia Email then most other Symbian phones from the last four years should be fine too.
IMPORTANT: Update the Mail settings on your Nokia phone Symbian
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a) it's still slow, especially on the limited processor power of the S60 3rd Edition generation. See below for thoughts on this....
b) setup (at least in this incarnation) no longer needs mobile data, just a valid network registration (e.g. "Vodafone")
c) disk space requirements for working space seem to be vastly less - I've been running Nokia Email on the N86 for a week and I've only lost a couple of hundred kilobytes, for example.
d) again, in this incarnation at least, there was no request for a Nokia sign-on, and delving into the settings reveals standard IMAP addresses, so there's no sign of email having to get routed through Nokia's servers.
e) installation still eats up multiple megabytes, but this is not a showstopper.
With regard to speed - or rather, lack of it - it's important to recognise that Nokia Email is a multi-threaded application, i.e. the UI and background processes operate at the same time. So don't expect a direct response from a keypress - although you may well get one, sometimes it takes a second or so for the UI's input to get passed through to the other threads. In practice, all this means that you have to have patience - there's no speeding through email as you might expect on a desktop application. Yes, it sucks that so much patience is required, but on the other hand I can't believe that, in late 2011, a S60 3rd Edition phone will be your primary means of email access.
If the speed is, ultimately, too much for you, then note that there are still third party email clients for Symbian, notably Profimail, though this requires some setting up for use with Gmail - another tutorial for another day!
The Nokia 9500 Communicator is an extremely powerful and feature rich PDA with a phone on the back cover. When closed, its styling can be generously called Retro or ungenerously "a brick". But when you open the clamshell, it reveals a beautiful color widescreen (640200)
Photos of the Nokai 9500 Communicator, next to a Motorola V330, Palm T2, dollar bill, and 12oz soda can.
The first thing that hits you when you see the Nokia 9500 communicator is that it is BIG! It still fits in the cell-phone pocket on my backpack, but the top flap was straining to get closed. Carrying it in your hip pocket is almost out of the question, although it does fit in cargo pockets (with a bit of flapping around) and side zip pockets on windbreakers. It fits well in your hand, and would make a good weapon! Closed, the styling is classic Nokia candy-bar, and nobody would mug you for this retro looking phone until they saw you open it.
Once you open the clam-shell, the phone goes from retro to super modern mini-palmtop. It has a very nice QWERTY keyboard with integrated 5 way select/mouse control on the bottom half, and a 640200 wide-screen display and 4 soft buttons on the top half. The screen is glorious, clear, sharp and bright! The combination of the wide-screen and advanced web browser provided the best mobile web browsing experience I have had short of a full laptop. Pressing Ctrl-T switches the web browser to full-screen mode, allowing full sized web pages to be easily read without side-to-side scrolling. It even supports JavaScript and Flash (giving GoogleAds and Flash ads on the mobile browser, which is also the first time I saw an advertisement on a mobile web browser.)
The email support is very standards compliant, and is able to access IMAP4/SSL mail servers, which is my preferred method. I'm sure it also supports syncing with Outlook/Exchange when using a windows computer, as this phone is definitely designed for business-people. The office productivity tools are boring but very functional, offering the ability to open/edit/create word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations. (Apparently, with the correct bluetooth adapter, you can show presentations on a projector straight from the 9500.)
While not offering quite the volume of 3rd party applications as Palm-OS, Symbian series 80 had the important ones that I went looking for: SSH, Ogg Vorbis music player, and some games were all free. (See links below). Several companies sell more advanced software for the Symbian Series 80 devices. The phone also runs Java MIDP 2.0 and Personal profile 1.0 midlets quite well, including Gmail and Google Mobile (Maps).
The Nokia 9500 offers very good performance when used as a Bluetooth Modem. Using the T-Mobile EDGE network in an area with medium signal strength, I averaged download speeds of 25KB/sec with 32KB/sec peeks, and upload speeds of 4KB/sec average with some sustained bursts of 12KB/sec. This is a good bit better than the Motorola V330 provided on the same plan (15KB/Sec down, and 2KB/sec up). Of course, EDGE is only a stopgap measure between GPRS and the true 3G UTMS, so if you have the option of purchasing a 3G/UTMS phone to use as a data modem pay the extra for much faster transfer speeds!
The camera is what you would expect, not terribly good, but passable for taking a quick snapshot. By default the jpeg quality is set to medium (approx 40KB an image). Since you have 80MB of Ram on the phone, turn the quality settings up to High and you'll get slightly better results. Example images in Medium and High quality settings are below:
Installing files via bluetooth: If you use OBEX Object Push to send an install file (SIS or Jar) to the 9500 it appears to disappear after the transfer! If you go to "Messaging" you will find that each object was entered as a "message" in your inbox, and you can Open them to start the install process.
J2ME Midlets & Soft-buttons: When running Java applications, the soft buttons on the side of the display are mapped to the "actions" that are displayed on the bottom of the display. So, unintuitively, the far left "action" is triggered using the "top" soft button, while the bottom soft button triggers the far right "action". (Why Nokia didn't display the actions along the side of the screen next to the soft buttons is a mystery to me, perhaps the J2ME specifications forced them to put them on the bottom, or perhaps they really wanted to use the full width of the screen. Google Maps looks very nice on the super wide screen display, but really, it's almost too wide, and I wouldn't have minded trading some of the side real estate for a butter UI.
Cell Phone vs Communicator: The 9500 appears to have two different CPU's running the PDA and Phone features. Although the PDA can access the Internet via the phone, and the contact list is shared, they can operate separately. For example, it is possible to turn the phone off (using the external power button) and have the PDA still running (open the clam-shell). I was unable to find a way to turn the PDA off (or reboot it) other than removing the battery, but as long as the clam-shell is closed it appears to be in a power saving standby mode. The two screens work well together, but the small external screen is not a usable substitute for the larger internal screen. For example, you can open your IMAP4 inbox using the external (phone) display, but when you try to read a message it gives you a message to "Open the telephone cover", not even trying to display the text of the message on the small screen. The PDA takes longer to boot than the cell phone, so you can have the external display up and running, while the internal display is still showing the Nokia Hands. (This only affects you if you've removed the battery however, normally the PDA is ready to go whenever you open the phone.)
Since May 2003, AccessWorld has published a groundbreaking series of seven articles that have evaluated the accessibility and usability of several cellular telephones and add-on software applications. In this article, in response to readers' suggestions, we at AFB TECH (the American Foundation for the Blind Technology and Employment Center at Huntington, West Virginia), have put together a summary of the options that are currently available to cell phone users who are blind or have low vision. So, this is not a traditional product-evaluation article in which we compare the relative merits of particular products. Instead, it is a summary of the information available at this time, designed to help readers make informed choices for purchasing a cell phone and a service plan and to clear up any remaining confusion. We will continue to evaluate new cell phones and software applications as they become available, and you can look forward to the Breaking News section of AccessWorld for our next evaluation of cell phones, which will look at the upgraded LG VX 4500 from Verizon Wireless and the new Voice Command software from Microsoft that is available on some new Pocket PC phones.
In the early days of cell phones, when they were used only to make and receive calls, accessibility was not a major issue. As long as visually impaired people could tactilely identify the control buttons on the cell phone, it was no problem to make and receive calls. However, they were left out of the loop when the evolution of cell phones brought display screens and other new advances, such as phone books, text messaging, and e-mail, into the mix. Although people who are visually impaired were still able to perform the basic functions of making and receiving calls, the manufacturers did not design these new phones in a way that would allow them to independently access the new, more advanced features. There was no text-to-speech functionality to accommodate cell phone users who are blind, and there were no display screens with the visual characteristics, such as large fonts or highly contrasting colors, that would accommodate users who have low vision. However, over the past two years, several cell phones have become available that have speech-output and screen-magnification capabilities, providing access to many advanced features.
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