Wealth of information at your fingertips, and (below) a Sony Ericsson K790i

Mobile blogs instead of postcards are an excellent way to keep in touch with your near and dear ones when you are travelling

I see a lot of people spend a tidy amount on swanky cell phones, but I find that very few put it to good use. Most mobile phones these days are capable of accessing the Internet. You have a wealth of information at your fingertips. But for this, you have got to enable GPRS on your phone.

“What is this GPRS and WAP? Why should I spend more to enable this? I am already spending...” This is what I hear from a majority of people who have GPRS capability on their phone. All I can say is that you don’t know what you are missing out on.

Hutch charges around Rs 49 a month for their service which is called PlanetHutch. The usage charge is only 10 paise for every 10 KB downloaded. Postpaid users can avail of better bargains. Airtel, on the other hand, charges Rs 99 a month for their WAP service. They have a premium service called ‘Email on the Go’ which integrates with a Blackberry or a handheld device using Windows Mobile 5.0. Here, charges range from Rs 350 to Rs 999 depending on your usage. For BSNL users, the tariff ranges from Rs 49 to Rs 199.

What is GPRS? General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) is a data service available to users of mobile phones. With this, you get a moderate Internet speed which is good enough for surfing the Net or sending emails for people on the go. You can even send and receive pictures on your phone through MMS or Multimedia Messaging. MMS has gained notoriety in the country for all the wrong reasons. People think MMS is only for juveniles to take lewd pictures with their phones and distribute them to their friends. But when put to good use, it is a wonderful tool.

All GPRS-enabled phones come with a WAP browser. This is the mobile version of the Internet browser. WAP stands for Wireless Application Protocol. With this, anybody can access sites specially made for mobile phones and hand held devices. Just as Internet websites are written using HTML, WAP sites are made up using WML or Wireless Markup Language. There are thousands of WAP sites which load fairly quickly on your phone. From these sites, you can get stuff from news to games all for free.

WAP Emulator

You probably receive several SMSs from your mobile phone company everyday inviting you to download video clips, ringtones or games. Once you say yes to a download, you are charged anything from Rs 10 to Rs 100. Bypass all this by activating GPRS and get the goodies for free from WAP sites. To get a feel of the utility of a WAP site, I suggest that you check some out from a regular Internet connection on your desktop computer. Go to www.wapsilon.com. This a free browser for WAP sites that uses Internet Explorer. Here you will get to see what a WAP site looks like without the inconvenience of the small screen of your phone. A good starting point is www.tagtag.com. See how you can build your own WAP site for free. Download the free Java games for your mobile. Get ringtones, pictures, streaming radio and video for free. Also, find links to more WAP sites as they are well categorised according to your interests. A good one is www.zedge.net. Try it.

Rediff’s mobile site at http://mobile.rediff.com has an interesting feature called Fare Search. With this you can find the lowest plane fare to any destination. One of my favourites is the BBC’s mobile version. Type http://www.bbc.co.uk/mobile/index.wml. The site has a fairly good mixture of news, information and brainteasers. The Telegraph (www.telegraphindia.com/wap), too, has a pretty good WAP site packed with news, information, phone numbers, flights and cinema timings.

Once you enable your GPRS on your mobile you will discover more sites. If you want to keep on top of your email, you can. Those with a Gmail account can go to www.gmail.com. Here you can read all your emails and even open the attachments. Rediff, Yahoo, etc. all have mobile versions of their email, but with truncated features. Gmail gives you the complete package that you get on your desktop computer.

Mobile Blogs

Those of you who are interested in blogging will find Blogger at go.blogger.com very interesting. When you send text or photos from your mobile device to go@blogger.com, they are automatically posted to your new blog page. The blog is viewable as a WAP page and as a website. Blogger works best with some of the latest Sony Ericsson phones like the K790i which has the Blogger software preloaded into the phone. All you have to do is use the phone’s send option to deliver the picture or text to your blog. The phone automatically resizes the image and dispatches it to your blog. The first time you do it, you will get an SMS from Blogger giving you a token. Once you enter the token number, you will be able edit your blog from your desktop computer. Typically, your blog address will be something like http://pitdee123.blogspot.com. You can change it to something friendlier once you enter the token number. You can post to a mobile blog using MMS and email too.

Those of you who do not like Blogger, can try out Mobylog at www.mobylog.com. Starting a blog is a simple process. Register, send your photos or videos by MMS, email, the mobyloader software or Nokia Lifeblog. Edit the content and then share it with your friends and relatives. Mobile blogs are an excellent way to keep in touch with your near and dear ones when you are travelling. Instead of sending picture postcards like we used to earlier, now you can take a picture from the fascinating place of your visit and post it on your blog. Friends and family can in this way track your movements as your travel from one place to another.

POP 3 email

Many phones have a built in email client these days. Those of you with a VSNL or Dataone account can read your email on the phone but you cannot reply to them. This is because both these service providers insist that you connect with their Internet connection to send and receive email. This is done to prevent misuse, but it is frustrating for us. A good way out is to set up a HotPOP account for your phone. Go to www.hotpop.com and register there. Next fill in the SMTP and POP data into your phone's email client. The Incoming/POP setting will be pop.hotpop.com at port 110. The outgoing/SMTP server will be smtp.hotpop.com at port 25. This way you have your email on the go with a minimum of fuss.

Send in your computer related problems to askdoss@abpmail.com. This column will appear every fortnight.