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Mobile Applications mobile manufacturers forgot to include

By Vipul Shah

Mobile Applications mobile manufacturers forgot to include

Having GPRS capable and enabled phone in pocket is nice but of not much use if you can’t do anything with it. Most GPRS phones in market don’t have an HTML browser hence you are limited to only WAP site and not HTML sites. Many news and service portals have PDA versions of their site which is perfect for mobile phones but you can’t see them. If you have been a Nokia user you will realize that excepting couple of models, all other lack proper email client supporting SMTP and POP3 and hence you are limited only to WAP access on them. Even those phone which offer e-mail client , like Siemens S55 and M55, they are crippled email client lacking very common sense features like downloading only headers and then downloading only those emails which user requests.

Reqwireless.com, a tiny 6 person startup in Waterloo, Canada is changing all this with very innovative J2ME software products named WebViewer and EmailViewer. These products overcomes all limitations of MIDP 1.0 and ends up giving user very fast, and very cost effective solutions for surfing web and checking any SMTP/IMAP/hotmail email account.  I find this email client better then all email clients I have tested on different mobile phones in market.

J2ME mobile applications face limitations of not being able to make smtp or pop3 connections to outside world, Reqwireless.com bypasses this limitation by having these applications make http connection to their middleware proxy server and from there all smtp, pop3 and other internet connections are made. Since all your connections would be going thru Reqwireless.com servers in Canada, you are strongly advised to check out their privacy policy before using these products. http://www.reqwireless.com/disclaimer.html

EmailViewer:

EmailViewer 2.3 is text and html based email software. Which means you will not only be able to get all your text emails but also those fancy html/rich text emails and read it on phone. It will use 55Kb memory in your phone. It does all cpu and bandwidth hungry work at their middleware server in Canada and sends to your phone only nicely formatted html pages designed to fit in your phones screen resolution.

Hence if you receive word or pdf file of 200k, you will get only  8 or 10k of html version of it and won’t be waiting for 200k download. If your gprs usage is by volume then you are going to save tons of money.This software also allows you to delete any mails from your mail server so you can delete all spam mails before it fills up your mail box. If there are any web links in email, you can click on it and go to that website and any other websites linked from there. Except going to new website you can keep surfing on linked website just as if you would do on web browser. It handles all attachments like zip, pdf, word, gif, jpeg, png, tiff, and bmp files. It supports SMTP authentication and also allows you to use their own smtp gateway if your ISP won’t allow you to connect from outside their dialup or cable network.

EmailViewer has spam filtering feature which will hide all spam mails from you, its best not to use this feature as its far from perfect. I couldn’t read mails from my friend at Siemens as they were all treated as spam by this application.

WebViewer:

WebViewer 3.2 is html based full browser supporting HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, MAIL and gopher URLs. It will use 47Kb memory in your phone. It renders pages reduced to fit your screen width and hence you won’t be ever scrolling left to right to read full pages. Though it can help you visit and check any website, it works best with websites designed for PDAs.

You can hunt down URLs for those site on google or visit http://www.vipulshah.com/liteurl.htm for small collection of news and info sites for PDA.

It allows you to do settings like cookies, cache, history, adding bookmarks. Advantage of this over WAP browser in phone is that you get to see more colorful webpages and faster access since lot of your phones work is done by middleware servers.  Also large number of info and news sites don’t have WAP version of their site but do have PDA version of their site in html.

Only disadvantage is it can’t use up/down scroll button found on left side of many phones like WAP browser can do. This shortcoming stems from lack of standard among mobile phone manufacturers about this buttons and unless applications are written for specific phones it can’t use them.

EmailViewer and WebViewer costs US$19.99/- each but together they cost US$34.99/-.

You can download 10 day trial version for free.
http://www.reqwireless.com
http://www.reqwireless.com/wap (from mobile WAP browser).

guide@vipulshah.com


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