five years agow850i and the mobile Gmail app

I finally reached the end of my tether with Orange and their customer service, continued cold calling from mobile phones, dreadful cattle-market style shops, and lack of knowledge of their sales staff. I was also paying over £100 a month for the everyday 50 plan which is about 9 years old now. It has only been 2 days but I am already much happier with T-Mobile and their flex-t plan.

The new phone is pretty sweet too, I went for the Sony Ericsson w850i in the end. Buying the phone online I got a cheaper package which encouraged me to get the web 'n walk package - always on flat rate Internet for £7.99 a month, quite a good deal I think. Any which way you calculate it, I'm paying a lot less than I used to!

phone.jpg

Initially I really wanted a phone that ran Edition 2 of the Symbian Series 60 operating system, so I could play with the gps software that Nick wrote. I was on the phone to t-mobile tech support for quite a while till we determined that they didn't stock any, its all edition 3 now and apparently python software that used to run on edition 2 now will be a bit flaky on 3 because it has to be signed.

The battery life of the W850i (if you are playing with settings and the interweb constantly) is not quite what I would like, and the buttons are quite tricky to use at first. However, there are a lot of really neat features, the inbuilt RSS reader is lovely! and knowing that the Internet is at a flat fee gives you peace of mind.

That became especially useful when I discovered the gmail mobile app. Having battled before with security certificates and pop3 settings on my old phone just to get mail to work, this mobile application by comparison is breeze. Its lightweight, fast, utterly gorgeous!

gmail.jpg

You can browse your mail, jump to star'ed mail, use keyboard shortcuts to reply and its all very aesthetic and nicely done. If you have ever battled with Gmail on your phone either with pop3 or in a browser, this will make you life a lot easier!

To download the google mobile app, go to gmail.com/app from your phone and follow the instructions there. It is apparently best to do this from your default mobile browser instead of from opera mini so that the download can detect your mobile model. Happy emailing!

Posted at 1:24 am on the 18th of January 2007. 5 Comments

5 comments

  1. I made the move from Orange to T-mobile nearly a year ago now, and am saving about £20-40/month. Service and signal is just as good, although after 8+ years on Orange, the answerphone hotkeys are taking a bit of getting used to - I keep deleting instead of replaying...

    Only recently discovered the joys of Opera Mini, when T-mobile introduced their £1/day cap and made it affordable. The Gmail app looks nice though, makes me wish I used Gmail. Need to find a Thunderbird-style imaps client!

    radiac 19th January 2007 09:27permalink.

  2. I was talking to someone about the iPhone and they said "doesn't matter about no 3rd party, you can use webapps". Then I showed them Gmail for mobile followed by Gmail via the browser. That Python collection looks cool. I run it on my S60, albeit without GPS. Have you seen the Nokia N95 with built in GPS, wi-fi etc? Very nice.

    Tim Almond 19th January 2007 15:04permalink.

  3. I'm currently using the same walkman, W850i. But i can't download the gmail app. I've got "HTTP status 406" message in my phone's browser. can you help me?

    Adham Somantrie 27th April 2007 10:29permalink.

  4. i hate sony ericson. bought the phone in feb 07. display stopped working in two months, there were function problems as well. the 's' atarted showing up as 'f'. the phone book also would not scroll. finally the display conked off. the authorised service station said that it was due to liquid damage. sweat! cant believe that a phone that costs so much would be damaged by a little bit of sweat. i have had nokias drowned in water but still working. the w850i is now unrepairable. replacement of hardware would cost a lot. hate sony ericson. regret switching from nokia

    dude 29th May 2007 11:55permalink.

  5. i really wont dis phone but tell me how good is it?

    rachel 12th February 2008 17:46permalink.

Comments are closed.

18th January 2007

You are reading "w850i and the mobile Gmail app" written by Natalie Downe on the 18th of January 2007 at 1:24 am.

Previously hosted at http://notes.natbat.net/2007/01/18/w850i/

Next: Talking about the weather

Previous: Upcoming geek fun and frivolities