midtoad's blog

Email via cellphone from PDA

Nothing earth-shaking here, but I got a new feature set up today. Now I can compose e-mail on my PDA, then send it via a wireless Bluetooth connection to my cell phone, which acts as an internet connection. If you need to do this, read on!

I used to be able to do this several years ago, with a Palm Tungsten PDA and a Ericsson R520, but now I have different hardware.

My cell phone is a SonyEricsson Z600. I turned on Bluetooth on the phone, then defined a new connection. Having previously turned on Bluetooth on my PDA, a Toshiba e830, the phone detected the PDA. So far, so good. But the phone and the PDA have to have a hand-shaking set up, where each one trusts the other.

On the PDA, I went to System > Connections, New Connection, and set up a new connection called "Z600". The number to dial is *99#. The user ID is 'fido', and the password is 'fido'. All other settings can be left alone. Now, the registration.

The registration is easier to do from the phone, so I started there. When prompted for a password, I entered a couple of digits & letters (not too many, since the process will time out if you take too long), and the phone contacted the PDA. The PDA then popped up a dialog where I entered the password, and all was well. Theoretically it's possible to start this authentication process from the PDA end, but Microsoft insists on making it difficult or impossible.

One the two devices were talking and trusting each other, I opened Microsoft Internet Explorer and brought up a web page: one with only a few words on it, since Fido is charging 3 cents per kilobyte for data transmission - that's $30/Megabyte! One web page with a few large graphic images could blow my month's lunch money (they *do* have some cheaper data plans if you buy in bulk, so to speak.

Next, I opened up the Messenger application and composed an e-mail on my Google Gmail account which I had previously configured (look in GMail's Settings page for instructions on how to do this). I pressed Send, and the PDA took about 15 seconds to make a connection (I think Google is overloaded today, as their service is also slow on my desktop PC at the moment), then another few to send the message.

So now I can send e-mail from anywhere I have cell service *and* GPRS coverage. If you look on your cell phone screen, right above the little bars that show signal strength there will be an inverted triangle that indicates the presence of GPRS service. Some (usually remote) locations may have cell coverage but not GPRS coverage. Generally, though, if you can talk, you can email.