Sunday, November 30, 2008

Built-in phone mail client configuration

So, you purchased a shiny new cellphone and flaunting its camera and navigation and browser and music player and other features. Contented with that only?? Don't be!! There are lots more inside which probably you don't know how to use. This post delves into one such feature which is found on almost all phones that have data connectivity i.e. GPRS, EDGE, 3G, HSDPA viz. the built in e-mail client.
For configuration instructions, I'm referring here Sony Ericsson phones. Configuration on other brands is similar too.
Ok, so lets start. SE phones can be broadly classified into two categories based on the software. The popular and mass seller among the two is their Java phones. All the K, C, T, Z series phones fall in this category. Most W series phones too fall in this category. W950 and W960 are the exceptions. The other category of their phones are the Smart Phones running Symbian OS. P and G series phones fall in this category. The configuration is quite similar on both types of phones. For coherency, I'm taking the Java phones in consideration. And, I'm taking GMail as your mail provider. Before doing all that is below, login to your gmail from your computer and enable POP and e-mail forwarding in settings. Also enable IMAP.
Now, on your phone open Menu-Messaging-Email-Accounts-New Account.
Enter your name, email address in the text boxes. In the username box enter in this format username@gmail.com and in password box enter your password. Choose Connection Type as IMAP4. Enter the server address as imap.gmail.com and SMTP server as smtp.gmail.com. Enable SSL in IMAP settings. In SMTP settings enable SSL as well as SMTP authentication and enter your username and password. Set the Connect using field to your default data(gprs/3g) account. Save the settings. You're done!!! Now open Inbox and in More click Send & Receive. Wait till the phone connects to google's servers and downloads your mails. It may take some time depending upon your connection speed and no. of mails in your inbox. To compose a mail use the Write new option in email menu. If you're stuck somewhere then do ask me with the details here by posting a comment. For newbies this may occur as I've written all of this thinking that you're a bit experienced with your phone.
In P series phones, all of this is pretty similar. In Messging tap More-Email accounts. There create new. IMAP and SMTP configuration settings are to be done in Inbox and Outbox tabs.
That was all for today. I'll come up with configuring your phone's IM client in the next post.

Saturday, November 29, 2008

Exams Time

My semester exams are scheduled to start from 19th of december. Not being serious towards studies and closed-eye answer sheet evaluation of my university, in previous two years I got quite a few unexpected setbacks with some bad results. Although, I've never been the brightest performer in my class but I had never performed so badly in the past as I performed here. I was always well above average and in the top 10% in my class which has now gone down to 20%. With a hope to pay attention towards studies this time, I decided to pack up my computer. I analysed the causes of academic deterioration and found that my computer was the prime source of distraction. I always used to be busy with the PC, googling for stuff, reading blogs, orkutting, managing my WAP site, playing games and watching movies and neglecting the book stuff and read them seriously only in the last 10 days before exams. Hope, this time I come up with a nicer result :) I've noticed an improvement in the last two days. I've started to love course books and getting flared towards reading them. Hope this goes on.
I packed up my PC, so how am I writing this blog post?? My phone is here with me and is a great alternative to my PC for net surfing, reading documents and pdfs, searching wikipedia for academic stuff and more, apart from blogging. I've three different ways to post. The first one is the built in browser Opera8 on the P1i. Opera9 and Ozone don't seem to work perfectly. Opera Mini 4.2 has a limit on number of characters. Mini Mod works fine but I don't use it much. The second one is Blogger Mobile application. It is nice too but is more oriented towards photo blogging. The third one which I prefer is Mail-to-Blogger. I just need to send a mail to an specified address. The title of the mail becomes the subject of the blog post, the text becomes the post. My phone's built in mail client has no limit on number of characters and typing on P1i's QWERTY keyboard is fast as Schumaker for me so this option fits best for me and I can type quickly and fastly and write on and on and on...
And since the phone is fully equipped at net so to avoid distraction from it I change the APN in internet accounts always after using so that un-necessarily I won't connect as it takes some time to tinker with the settings to fix it. A couple of hours in the evening and a few minutes in the morning after waking up is sufficient.
This much is enough for now. Stay tuned. The next post will be on e-mail client configuration on Sony Ericsson phones. Most SE users aren't aware that there is such a nice e-mail client on their phones. So for their awareness.

Monday, November 24, 2008

Ozone for UIQ3

And finally, what I was waiting for my P1i is out!!! Yes, the bestestestest mobile web browser for the UIQ3 platform is out!! It is called Ozone and can be downloaded from their site http://www.o3mobi.com/
Before Ozone, we the forgotten UIQ users had only 3 native options apart from the java based rocker Opera Mini viz. the built in Opera 8.65, @Web and Opera Mobile 9.5 beta. The 1st one is too crappy and renders pages weirdly. Especially I hate the automatic link highlighting and text highlighting with a contrasting colour on some themes in Opera 8.65. Then came @Web, based on Apple Webkit engine promising big things. But, it fell like a dead monkey. It is pretty medicore at UI, features, user friendliness and more. Then the biggest fuss maker for WM phones, landed to UIQ - Opera Mobile 9.50. But, it sucks at speed and stability. And it is pretty heavy on resources. I remember once while surfing through Opera Mobile I had opened heavy sites on four tabs and it had eaten up the whole 75MB free RAM of my phone. I got a call but could not receive it because of no RAM!!! I had to take out battery to reset. Damn you Opera!!!!
And finally today I read about Ozone on UIQblog.com. Downloaded and installed it right away. The peculiar thing is that it identifies itself as Apple iPhone's user agent. So, I directly opened Orkut on it to experience the iPhone version of Orkut on it. And guess what? It rocks!!! It rules!!! Although P1 has a resolution of 240*320 and iPhone has a hefty VGA screen, but Orkut looked pretty on P1. I had to scroll horizontally, but it was a nice experience. Google guys have designed Orkut for iPhone pretty intuitively and aesthetically appealing and later sprinkled decent user friendliness on it.
Earlier I was jealous of Nokia fanboys having better browser(Safari) on their Symbian 9 series phones. But now Ozone comes to the rescue and it beats Safari as well as Opera Mobile hands down!
My verdict on Ozone: The best mobile browser ever made for Symbian OS.
Plusses: very stable, fast, intuitive, user friendly, fast page rendering, low on resources, free
Cons: Its an alpha version!, seems to fail to load Orkut's desktop version

Current UIQ browser scores out of 100(My opinion)
1. Opera Mini 4.2 - 99
2. Opera Mini Mod 2.06 - 95
3. Opera Mini Official 3.2 - 94
4. Opera Mini Mod 3.x - 93
5. Ozone 0.9 - 87(Native UIQ app)
6. Opera Mobile 9.50 - 81(Native UIQ app)
7. @Web 2.0 - 65(Native UIQ app)
8. Opera Mobile 8.65 - 54(Built in)
9. Tea Shark - less than 40(failed)
10. UCWeb - less than 30(failed)

Please note: This is my opinion based on the browsing experience on my favourite sites on my P1i that I use regularly. It doesn't have any connection with any other individual, company, site, platform, phone. And the opinion can differ user wise. Please don't flame me with comments if your opinion differs. You stay happy with your opinion and me with mine :)

Saturday, November 22, 2008

Some free PHP-MySQL hosts

Want to have a small DB driven web/WAP site??? Here I write about a few selected ones.
FreeHostia
If you want almost hundred percent uptime then this one is surely for you. Although they're low at bandwidth(5GB/month) and space(250MB) but they've excellent uptime and very fast servers. A couple of demerits are that you can't use more than 1.3% of their CPU time per day and another is that file size limit is 500KB. The former implies that if your site uses heavy scripting, lots of modules and non-optimized code and you've lots of visitors then you'll cross the 1.3% limit with ease. Another demerit is that fsockopen, mail etc are disabled. Pros: no ads *grin
VNDV
Here you get 6gigs of space and 50 gigs/month bandwidth!!! File size limit is 8MB. Most serious con is that they remain down a lot and for very long periods. Recently they had some disk related problem so all sites went to read only mode and they had to run fsck(file system check). It used to happen twice every week and your site remained down for about 4 hours. But now they've solved that problem. Another problem that occured 4 days ago was that they went down for four days and came back today morning!!!!!! fsockopen and mail are not allowed here too. Pros: no ads, lots of space and bw.
Byethost
They've 300MB space and 20 gigs of bandwidth. Pretty decent enough. And recently they've also allowed fsockopen. And smtp through google's smtp server. Fastest host I've ever used. Almost 100% uptime. I've never experienced any downtime there yet!! The only and crappiest demerit that prevents you to host a mobile site there is that they filter out most of the mobile phone user agents as spam bots and don't allow access to your site. For a website they're extremely good. No ads here too.
Orgfree
They've 300MB space and unmetered bandwidth. They allow mail, fsockopen and all other bells and whistles of PHP. Butttttttttttttttttttt!! They display ads. Small text/banner ads are displayed on your site. I found a workaround to remove ads. Just set the MIME type of your pages as application/vnd.wap.xhtml+xml instead of text/html. But then, IE, FF, Chrome etc won't open your site. Only Opera will. They're good for mobile sites but in their terms they've written that they'll delete mobile sites if detected. That happened to me!!!!
X10Hosting
Crap! Crap!! Loads of crap!!! Thats what I say after using them. They've tougher conditions and they suck at uptimes. I used to experience daily about 2-3 hours downtime in evening. Finally I left them and they deleted my site.

000webhost.com is a scam!!! Don't signup there. They only lure you to get a large user base for spreading their referral program. When you signup, they'll register you at another host which is a free one provided by byethost. Whenever you see a host with Vista Panel, 300MB space just take for granted that it's another free one provided by byethost. Byethost allow you to open a hosting company for free. And thats as crap as byet.

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Sending multipart MIME mail with inline image

From today morning itself, I'm trying to send a MIME mail with PHP's mail() function that displays an image inline. But, I don't know where the <bleep> I'm making the mistake. The image goes but in GMail it shows up as an attachment instead of getting displayed inline. Here's my source code:
<?php
$to="prab97@indiatimes.com";
$from="help@indiatimes.com";
$subject="Verify";
$boundary="whatever";
$headers="MIME-Version: 1.0\r\n";
$headers.="Content-type: multipart/mixed; 
      boundary=\"$boundary\"\r\n";
$headers.="From: ".$from."\r\n";
$headers.="Reply-To: ".$from."\r\n";
$message = "--$boundary\n";
$message.="Content-type: image/png\n";
$message.="Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64\n";
$message.="Content-disposition: inline\n\n";
$encoded = base64_encode(file_get_contents("image.png"));
$message.=$encoded."\n";
$message.="--$boundary\n";
$message.="Content-type: text/html; charset=\"iso-8859-1\"\n";
$message.="Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit\n";
$message.="Content-disposition: inline\n\n";
$message.="This is a test. <a href="test.tst">Test</a>\n";
$message.="--$boundary--";
$send=mail($to, $subject, $message, $headers);
if($send){
echo "Mail was sent successfully!";
}
else {
echo "Failed!!!";
}
?>


I tried multipart/mixed, multipart/alternative, multipart/related but can't succeed in making it display inline. I want the image to be displayed first, followed by html text. There's no clue I'm getting about where I went wrong. If you've any idea then do tell me.

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Scripting in an image with PHP

The title of this post may seem confusing to you. Let me make it clear. Here I am presenting a simple method for running a PHP script whenever a visitor of your sites retrieves a specific image file from your server.
In this example
Here, I am considering an image file hi.gif which when requested by a user runs PHP code to log the user's details. I assume, you're running Apache and PHP5. If you want a free host for this experiment then x10hosting is for you.

So, lets begin.
1. Open notepad and put the below code inside and save the file as "hi.gif"
<?
$LogFile="Log.txt";
$Date=date("F j, Y");
$Logging = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']." - ".$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']." - ".$_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']." - ".$Date;
$Post = fopen("$LogFile","a");
fputs($Post,$Logging);
fclose($Post);
$icon = "../hi.gif";
header("Content-Type: image/jpeg");
$blah=fopen($icon, "rb");
while(!feof($blah)){
$data=fread($blah, 512);
echo $data;
}
?>


2. Now open notepad again and put this inside and save the file with name ".htaccess"
<FilesMatch "\.(bmp|gif)$">
SetHandler application/x-httpd-phpv2
</FilesMatch>


3. Now login to your server's FTP daemon and in images directory put the hi.gif and .htaccessthat you created above. Also create a "log.txt" in your pc and upload this zero length file to the same directory. CHMOD log.txt to 777 or 666

4. Now go to one directory level up and upload the original real hi.gif that you want to show to the user.

5. Done!!! Yes! You're done. The URL to ur image script will be http://yoursite.com/images/hi.gif


Explanation
The .htaccess file directs the server to parse all gif and bmp files in that folder as php scripts - the FilesMatch directive of Apache does that.
The hi.gif file accessed by the user is actually the PHP script that tracks user agent, referrer, ip and date of its accesser and then writes this info to log.txt and then returns to the user the contents of a real image hi.gif located one folder up. Thats it :)

There are many uses of this script including malicious ones. I leave it to yourself for thinking about its potential uses.

Saturday, November 8, 2008

Best UIQ3 Apps(Part-2)

Well, so lets proceed with the second part of Best UIQ apps.

QFlashLight(must have)
This is a torch app. Works best on P1i, this app can turn on both the LEDs at once and the brightest torch app available.

Swiss Manager
This is the Swiss army knife for your UIQ device. It has a nice Task Manager, File manager, System Info page and lots more. Though cool, I don't use it much.

The Open Screen Capture
As the name suggests, it is an open sourcse screenshot program.

LCG X-Plore(must have)
One of the best apps available for any smart phone!! It has virtually everything built inside!!! It is a file manager, video player, music player, zip/rar extractor, doc viewer, hex editor and lots more!! A must have for all UIQ users.

Abakus
Its a cool and handy calculator app for your UIQ phone. Scientific and Engineering modes are there apart from the basic mode.

BestCrypto
This app can be used to protect your private pics, sounds and everything by encrypting and password protecting them.

DocumentsToGo Word/Slide/Sheet(must have)
These three programs are your replacement for any office suite! Apart from viewing any of your office documents, you can edit them as well. And the latest version even supports the latest docx(Office 2007 format). Its an another must have app.

Foxit Reader
Though new, but its a very good alternative for the built in PDF+. It lets you view PDF files just as they appear in your computer. But the app lacks fullscreen view and some more needed features. Well, they should be available soon, as the developers put more of them inside.

MobileFTPd
This app can turn your UIQ smart phone into an FTP server. So you can access your phone files remotely from any part of the earth.

StickIt
This app can stick your notes to the standby screen so you keep getting reminded of your notes whenever you have a look at your phone.

WorldMate
This one is for travel junkies, those who keep roaming around the world. It can help you plan your travel better.

Torch
Although it can't light the LEDs as bright as QFlashLight, but it is handy when you don't need lots of light. Get it from swmail's site.

With this I end this post. Enjoy your UIQ3 device :)

Wednesday, November 5, 2008

Best UIQ3 Apps

As you might be knowing, I'm the owner of a Sony Ericsson P1i which runs on UIQ3 which in turn runs on top of Symbian OS 9.1; I am dedicating this blog post to the apps I use on my phone. I am not providing any link here to download the apps, you should give some pain to your fingers and google for the apps.

Oh wait..... Don't get disappointed. You can get all the apps full and cracked at imserba forums thats http://www.imserba.com/forum/. If you've ever used a Nokia S60 phone then you might be knowing about many of these apps. Some apps have been supplied with a direct download page link here. Others can be found from imserba. Ok, so lets start:


Agile Messenger
This is an IM app so you can hook your phone to ICQ, MSN. AOL, Yahoo! and GTalk messengers in one go and simultaneously. Works very good.

Blogger
This app, you can get from the SE's Fun & Download site. This is the same Blogger app's UIQ version which you might have seen on Cyber-shot phones that feature mobile blogging.

Core Player(must have)
This is a killer app for UIQ phones!!! Makes your phone a true multimedia device. It support lots of audio, video and pic formats but I mainly use it for playing videos with extension AVI, MPG, DAT, MPEG, MOV. It supports following filetypes: aac, asf, aif, avc, bmp, flac, amr, awb, h264, jpg, jpeg, m3u, mka, mkv, midi, mid, mp1, mp2, mp3, mpa, mpeg, mpg, mpv, m1v, m4v, mp4, mov, 3gp, m4a, m4b, k3g, mc, mpc, nsv, ogg, ogm, pls, png, spx, tif, tiff, ts, m2ts, avi, divx, gvi, xvid, wv, wma, asx, wmx, wvx, wax, wav, rmp

Fring
This too is an IM app, but supports VoIP calls so you can talk to your gtalk, yahoo friends directly if the phone is hooked to net through WiFi. Download it to your phone from m.fring.com

Google Maps
Google have released finally the native UIQ version of Google Maps with satellite view, traffic info and lots more. Get it from Google Maps site or the UIQ site.

Image Converter
As the name suggests, it can convert any image among various image formats.

LCG Jukebox
For the S60 fans who used it, its available here on UIQ too. But if you didn't know about it then don't use it. The Walkman player is better on P1.

Opera Mini 4.1 & Opera Mobile 9.5(must have)
Both of these are the bestestesttest browsers available for mobile phones. Everyone knows about them. Get the mini from mini.opera.com and the big one from opera.com/products/mobile

Slick
Yet another IM app, but with cool and slick looks. Try it if you're an experimenter.

Digia @Web
A very good browser. It boasts itself as the full finger touch browser and yes thats true!!! You don't need any keypresses for browsing, except for typing URLs and form data. Get it from their site

Yell Radio
A cool internet radio program. Though I don't use it because of my crappy gprs connection.

Tweak Peaks
This app turbocharges your phone to work fast by implementing some POSIX libraries. Also you can change your browser's homepage through it. But, it requires capsSwitch for the latter task. Get it from cellphonesoft.com

Airtel Live TV
Never worked for me after I purchased my P1. Thats because Airtel has shutdown all those channeld. Will run great after 3G starts.

Mobipocket Reader
It enables you to read e-books in PRC format.

CapsSwitch(must have)
This is the hack app for UIQ. It turns off system file protection and much more security restrictions and unlocks access to system folders. Get it from its developer's site http://101swmail010.googlepages.com/uiq3mods

GDesk
A very good app. It replaces that old boring desktop with new great looking designs with icon launchers and menus. Get it from http://gdesk.wetpaint.com/. Their site is weird! It'll take you lots of time to search for the download link. Go search it and know more about it there.

iPhoneLock
A keylock app that works just like the iPhone's keylock. Cool one. But it has some issues if you've turned on the Inactivity Lock in your security settings. Get it from http://iphonelock.kwull.com/download.html



Well, there are lots more apps remaining on my phone that haven't been listed here. I'm now tired of typing, so I'm splitting this venture into two parts. The next set of apps and their functions will be posted when I do the next update of my blog(that should be within 2-3 days).

Sunday, November 2, 2008

1337

1337 or lEET means "eleet" or rather "elite" and is mainly used for expert users/hackers on the Internet and is as old as the internet itself. 1337 actually is the language used by "eleet" people which substitutes alphabets from english language with similar looking numbers and ASCII symbols. There is also no need to follow the grammar when you are writing in leet.
In fact there is a firefox extension that allows you to write in leet. You can get it from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/770 Apart from leet, it also allows a user to write in Hex, Binary, Morse and lots more languages.

Even Google has a leet version which can be reached at:
http://www.google.com/intl/xx-hacker/

For more information on leet, you can have a look at following sites:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leet
http://www.1337.net/
http://www.wikihow.com/Read-and-Write-in-1337

Saturday, November 1, 2008

Mobile SMS Life

Do you want to send free SMSes(India only)??? Mobile SMS Life is the best thing for this in my view. Earlier 160by2.com was the leader but now it allows only 10 SMSes per day on a single number. SMSLife comes to rescue. It allows 100 text messages and 10 voice messages per day on any number in India.
SMSLife is a java application so it can run on any phone that supports J2ME. You must've GPRS active, for sending messages. Download the app directly into your phone from their mobile site m.smslife.in. You need to register an account on their website before you start sending messages.
The voice message feature is cool. Whatever you type and send, will be read by a female voice in a call to the receiver. The call comes from a number from STD code 044.
Use and enjoy :)

Hard time for SE

It seems that SE is having a hard time in the market. The sales are decreasing day by day. No doubt SE designs the best phones in the range from Rs.4k onwards but it is now being ruled out of the roost. Nokia as always is dominating due to its craze and people being ignorant that an SE is always better and easier to use than a Nokia. Although Nokia phones are more durable than SE ones but I still prefer an SE because of the ease of use, size and shape. Well, the SE guys have done a great mistake by breaking the relation with UIQ. By the way, SE is loosing in India due to one more reason - the cheap chinese phones which play MP3's as loud as a music system are taking over the market in the range Rs.3k-Rs.10k. Well whatever goes, I'll always be loyal to SE.