Friday, November 28, 2008

Send a message

To create a new message on the phone, choose the Options > Create message > Email menu in the Messaging application (Series 60) or the Messages > Email > Create email menu (Series 40). You can select any recipient from the phone's Contacts list or type in any valid email address in the To and Cc fields. The body field of the email composition form is pre-populated with your email signature, if you have one. Type in your message and select the Options Send menu to send the message using the currently active mailbox settings.

Set up your mailboxes

Setting up mailboxes is quite easy on both Series 60 and Series 40 phones.

On a Series 60 device, you can just launch the Messaging application and choose the Options > Settings > Email > Mailboxes menu. Then you can select and edit any existing email message in the Inbox. Or, you can use the Options > New mailbox menu item to create a new mailbox for an email account. The Messaging application's main screen lists the phone's native Inbox (for receiving SMS and MMS messages) as well as all configured mailboxes. Email messages are pulled into the mailboxes, not into the native Inbox. The Options > Settings > Email > Mailbox in use menu item points to the default mailbox to use when sending email messages.

A Series 40 phone can hold 520 mailboxes (i.e., email accounts). You can activate a mailbox via the menu path Messages > Message settings > Email messages > Active email settings (or via Messages > Email > Setting > Mailbox in use for older phones). The email Inbox (in Messages > Email > Inbox) on the phone retrieves messages from the currently active mailbox, and all outgoing email messages are sent via the SMTP server in the active mailbox. To edit the settings for a mailbox, you need to first activate it and then select the "Edit active email settings" (or "Edit active mailbox") menu in the email settings screen.

In the mailbox settings screen for both Series 60 and Series 40 phones, you need to enter the following information:

  • Your email address
  • An SMTP server address and its access credentials
  • A POP/IMAP server and its access credentials
  • The data access point to connect to the email servers
The security setting specifies whether the phone uses encrypted connections (SSL) to connect the email servers. You should always try this option first, and disable it if you get an error. SSL protects your username and password from eavesdroppers. Although it also transports your email messages securely, the moment a plain-text email message hits the wide-open Internet, it becomes susceptible to eavesdroppers.

The SMTP server and POP/IMAP server share the same GPRS access point and the same username/password. Some devices (e.g., the Nokia 6230 phone in Series 40) allow you to specify a different GPRS access point, and a different username/password for the SMTP server and the POP/IMAP server, respectively. Many phones also support the Authenticated POP (APOP) protocol to retrieve messages. Under APOP, the user-name and password are sent in encrypted format to the POP server. APOP provides protection against network sniffers that intercept clear-text passwords.

Email Basics


When you send and receive email messages over the Internet, your email client software on the PC or on the phone primarily needs to communicate with two types of email servers over the TCP/IP protocol:

Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMTP) server
Takes email messages from your email client and sends them to the recipient's email server. To avoid being exploited by spammers, most SMTP servers require you to have an account with them and to authenticate yourself before you can send an email message.

POP or IMAP servers
Give you access to your email accounts. Your email client software logs into the POP or IMAP server periodically, using your username and password, to check for and retrieve new messages.
Typically, your SMTP and POP/IMAP servers are hosted by your Internet Service Provider (ISP) or by your company's IT department. If you use web mail (e.g., Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail), you typically need to pay for the privilege to directly access their mail servers.

An open source program called YPOPs emulates a POP3 account over your free Yahoo! Mail account on your own computer. For more information, visit http://yahoopops.sourceforge.net/.

Send and Receive Email on Your Phone


Send and receive email on your phone using your regular email account.
To send and receive email via SMS and MMS, you need to use the wireless operator's special email address, which is tied to your phone number. While this is convenient, it does not address the needs of most email users, especially business users, who need to manage email in multiple existing accounts while on the road. To access regular email on a Nokia phone, you have to configure the phone with your email server and account information. In this hack, I will teach you how to do that. But first, let's go over some basic concepts regarding the Internet email infrastructure.

To access email on your phone, you also need to subscribe to General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) or Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) 1x data services. On some networks, the MMS access point provides access to email as well.

Receive Email Via SMS

If you look more closely, you'll see that the message comes from an email address that contains a mobile phone number. If you reply to this message or simply send a new message to that address, you will receive it on the phone as an SMS message. This feature is known as an email-to-SMS gateway.

Almost all wireless operators offer this kind of gateway at no extra charge beyond regular SMS subscription or per-message charges. An alternative way to send SMS messages via the wireless operator is to submit the message and target phone number to a web-to-SMS web form typically available on the operator's consumer portal web site once you log in.

Table below shows the web form and gateway email addresses for popular wireless operators in the U.S. If your operator is not in this table, you can typically call the operator's technical support to find out its gateway email address. This way, you can get your email messages delivered to almost any phone as SMS messages.

Nextel
http://messaging.nextel.com/
@messaging.nextel.com

SprintPCS
http://messaging.sprintpcs.com/
@messaging.sprintpcs.com

AT&T Wireless
http://www.mymmode.com/messagecenter/
@mobile.att.net

Cingular
http://www.cingular.com/sendamessage
@mobile.mycingular.com

Verizon
http://www.vtext.com/
@vtext.com

T-Mobile
http://www.t-mobile.com/messaging/
@tmomail.net

In addition to the operator gateways, other commercial email-to-SMS gateways interoperate with multiple operators. For instance, a service called Teleflip (http://www.teleflip.com/) forwards any message sent to the address @teleflip.com to the target phone number as an SMS message (this service works only in the U.S.).

The SMS message is limited to 160 characters. You cannot send long messages or message attachments to a phone via SMS.

Since SMS messages cost money to send and receive, it is crucial that wireless operators incorporate some security measures into the SMS-to-email gateway to prevent spam. As a result, you cannot send more than 10 messages in a short period of time (typically several minutes) via the gateway. To send many SMS messages from the PC or a backend server to a phone.


Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Send Email Via MMS in Nokia Smartphone


The MMS service allows you to send messages with multimedia attachments from one phone to another, or from a phone to any email address. All you need to do is to open the Messaging application (Series 60) or the Messages menu (Series 40), choose New Message, and then choose to create a multimedia message. Using the Options Add Recipient menu option, you can select any email address from your Contacts list in the To or Cc fields. In the message composition window, you can type some text and/or attach media files. Once you click Options Send, the phone queues the message for delivery to the selected email addresses.
Alternatively, you can choose any media file in the Gallery and use the Options Send Via MMS menu item to create a message composition form with the file already attached. Or, you can choose any person from the Contacts list and use the Options Create message Multimedia message menu to create a message with the To field already filled in.

Most wireless operators limit the size of MMS messages to 100 KB or less. You probably will be unable to attach more than two VGA (640 x 480) quality pictures in the message.

In your email client, you can retrieve the message and view its contents, including any attachments. Your wireless operator might add a logo or some custom graphics to the message.

Send Email the Easy Way

Using the existing mobile messaging infrastructure to send and receive email messages is convenient and fits seamlessly with the mobile user experience.

The easiest way to send and receive email messages is to use the underlying wireless messaging infrastructure. You can use the SMS and MMS clients built into your phone to transport email messages. The tight integration between the message client and the wireless network offers some great benefits from the user's perspective:

It is very easy to use. You do not need to install any additional software or configure anything on the phone or in the email account. It just works.

The incoming messages are pushed to your phone. You are notified with a tone or an on-screen message when the message arrives. There is no need to push the "Check mail" button to check and retrieve messages.

Of course, this approach also has several drawbacks that you should be aware of when deciding whether this is the right way for you to connect to email:

The biggest drawback is that you cannot use your existing email accounts to send or receive messages. Instead, the messages are routed through special accounts provided by the wireless operator.

Although the email accounts and infrastructure are free, you need to subscribe to MMS and/or SMS services, and there might be a per-message charge.

There are size limits for both SMS and MMS messages. You cannot send long messages or big attachments. I will illustrate this point in more detail later in this hack.

The wireless network does not have a service guarantee for SMS or MMS. It might take a long time to deliver a message. The message might be dropped silently if it is not delivered in 24 hours.

Overall, this method works great for casual mobile email users. Now let's check out exactly how it works.

The regular email infrastructure over the Internet also does not have a service-level guarantee. But the wireless data network is less reliable than the Internet. In addition, the SMS traffic is low priority on wireless networks. Also, when an Internet email message doesn't make it to its destination, you will usually receive a failure notification.

Copy and Paste in Nokia Smartphone

One of the most overlooked items in the manual for your handset is the ability to copy and paste text. I found myself wishing I could do this on several occasions, blissfully unaware that this functionality is actually built into my phone.

On a Series 60 phone (Nokia 3650, N-Gage, and many others), simply press and hold the pen/ABC key when you are editing text in an email, the Note Viewer, or other application. Normally this button allows you to change input modes from various languages, or to switch between T9 and multitap. If you press and hold this button, however, any movement with the navigation pad (i.e., the joystick) will draw a selection box around the text of your choosing.

Once you have selected some text in this way, press the Options soft key and select the Copy option. To paste, simply put the cursor where you want it, press the Options soft key again, and select the Paste option

This is a clever way to add address information from an email to the contact card of a friend, or to capture a long URL from your browser to email to someone else.

A Guide to T9 Text Input


When entering text on the phone's numeric keypad, most people rely on the easiest but slowest multitapping method. Using multitapping, each alphabetic letter requires multiple repeated keystrokes on the keypad. For instance, to enter the letter i, you need to tap the 4 key three times; to enter the letter c, you need to tap the 2 key three times; and so on. Hence, typing a message such as "I cannot find my pants" requires that you press the numbers 444 222266666668 333444663 6999 726687777 on your phone's keypad. Come on, people, the Morse code is faster!

In the multitapping mode (alphabetic input mode), it is slow to enter numbers. For instance, you need to press the 2 key four times to enter the number 2. You can enter numbers quickly by switching to the numeric input mode, but switching modes is slow when you have mixed letters and numbers. To speed up number input, you can press and hold the number key to get that number without leaving the current input mode.

Thankfully your Nokia phone supports Text on Nine Keys (T9), which lets you type that phrase in roughly half the number of keystrokes: 4 226668 3463 69 72687. Figure 10-1 shows the sequence for typing "pants."

T9 is a predictive-text input engine from Tegic Communications (which is owned by AOL) for mobile devices such as your mobile phone. Instead of having to press each key multiple times for just one letter, you press each numeric key only once per letter; as you're pressing the keys, T9 will examine what you're typing and predictively figure out the potential combinations for valid words. Most handsets will pop up a list that shows you which word Tegic thinks you're typing, but you can just wait until you are done typing the word, and it will be right in most cases. If not, you can select the next matching word from the T9 dictionary. If you don't see anything marked "next," it is probably the 0 key.

You might find that T9 is not enabled on your phone by default. On a Series 60 device, tap the pen/ABC key and a menu appears: select Predictive Text On from this menu. (You can switch it off by selecting Predictive Text Off from the menu.) On a Series 40 device, press and hold the Options soft key to toggle predictive input. You will know when predictive text is enabled by looking at the pencil icon at the top of your screen. A pencil with lines under it indicates predictive text, and no lines indicates multitap, as shown in Figure 10-2.

Most handsets also allow you to add words to your dictionary. When confronted with a word the dictionary doesn't know, the phone asks you to spell it, and then it saves it to its local dictionary. In the episode of Seinfeld called "The Soup Nazi," Jerry and his girlfriend call each other "shmoopie" as a term of endearment. Figure 10-3 shows me trying to add this word to the T9 dictionary on my Nokia 3650. The question mark at the end (and the appearance of the Spell soft key) indicates that T9 wasn't able to find the word in the dictionary. The "sion" in the figure is T9's guess as to what word I meant to look up.

Since Tegic doesn't recognize the word, I need to type it in. First, I must press the */+ key to cycle through all the possible spellings. When I've gone through them all, the Spell soft key appears (it might temporarily take the place of the Options soft key). Next, I must press the Spell soft key to use multitap to input my word the old-fashioned way.

I correctly spell the word "shmoopie" and press OK to save it for later. Now I can use T9 to type "shmoopie" whenever I desire (see Figure 10-5). Believe it or not, I use that word at least twice a day on workdays, and once per weekend.

Let's look at how long it would have taken me to type this with multitap. Before having this word in my dictionary, typing it out took 19 keystrokes, not including pauses between the "m" and "o" keys (when you use multitap to type two consecutive letters that appear on the same number key, you have to pause between typing letters). Now it takes only as many button pushes as the word contains letters8, in fact, which takes a lot less time than 19, even if you're a really fast multitapper.

See http://www.t9.com/ for more information and interactive demos.

Smartphone Keypad Typing Tips

Composing your messages on a phone keypad doesn't have to be painful. Most handsets make it pretty easy, but the easy way is sometimes obscure.

Typing on the small keypad is always the challenge for mobile phone messaging. Some Nokia smartphones, such as the 6800/6820 in Series 40 and 9300/9500 in Series 80, are equipped with fold-out QWERTY keyboards. Those devices are ideal for messaging and enterprise applications.

For Nokia Series 60 smartphones, it is often possible to use an external keyboard. The Nokia Wireless Keyboard is a full-size, foldable keyboard that works over Bluetooth. Only Nokia 7610 and newer Series 60 smartphones are officially supported by this keyboard, but Nokia 6600 is also known to work. Besides Nokia's own offerings, the Think Outside Stowaway Bluetooth keyboard (http://www.thinkoutside.com/) is another choice. The Think Outside keyboard supports older Nokia Series 60 devices such as the Nokia 3600 and 3650.

While keyboards are nice, most mobile phone users still need to rely on the keypad to enter messages. In this hack, I will cover several important techniques to improve text input on regular smartphone keypads.