New Nokia site

Nokia as always is always trying to do something that is different from the rest. From collecting info about diseases, to providing farmer information to the people who need it. Recently Nokia has just launched a new website, www.nokia.com/responsiveness. The website centers around Nokia’s messaging service. This has been done in conjunction with TED fellows, who have featured in some videos for the site, which put a different spin on things.

So what is it about you ask? Well, I’ll let you explore this and tell me what is it all about…

Teach the Technophobe: Challenges – 3 and 4

The third challenge for the Teach the Technophobe was delivered to me a long time back, it was also completed on time. But since I have just moved to a new city, and I did not have an internet connection (broadband) to blog about it, the information of it was not put up here.

The third challenge required my technophobe to take a phot of himself and also send a position of himself, using the Maps application, to me via email. The distance meant that I had to email the instructions to my technophobe. I knew this would be difficult and I had my fingers crossed, I prayed for him to be able to complete it without any hiccups. My technophobe had not used Maps before and emailing me his exact position through the application itself was another level of toughness for him.

But all my fears were laid to rest when I recevied his email with his photo and a ‘.lmx’ file. the ‘.lmx’ file was basically a file, which when opened in Maps would tell me exactly where he was at that time.

My technophobe had been able to do what I thought was a tough task for him. I asked him later on if he found the task difficult or no, his response, only marginally, the instructions were clear and the UI and the phone made it much more simple. I was delighted, here was a person who was using  a 6681 in his daily course, telling me that something as ‘advanced’ as the E75 was easy to get used to and really nice to use.

Challenge #3 over.

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Challenge #4 was pretty easy, to say the least, but made difficult by my inability to access my blog due to an absence of an internet connection. Now I know that the phone has a woking internet connection,but 20-30Mb of video to be uploaded onto YouTube and then embedded into my blog would have taken close 3 hours, all thanks to an EDGE connection only that is prevalent in India. My problem was also compounded a bit by some ‘Tax Law’ issues that the state of UP has (I’m in NOIDA now…) this meant that my shipment had already reached New Delhi but due to some stupid paperwork it reached my hands only on the 10-11th August I think. So the delay in posting this challenge on my blog.

Below is not one but two videos of my technophobe, talking in brief about his experience of using the E75 and the email functionality.

Another one:

With this I can safely say that the challenges are all over!

Mission Accomplished!

I would like to thank Nokia, WOMWorld and their extremely warm and kind employees. The people at WOMWorld have been very helpful at every step and their professionalism is something that needs to be complimented. Kudos to WOMWorld! You are really great!

Teach the Technophobe: Challenge 2

Having received the second technophobe challenge, It was time to get into action. When one is about 1600kms away, it becomes difficult to teach a technophobe how to use the various features on the E75.

But I have full trust in my technophobe’s learning abilities. Anyways, I called my technophobe and gave him instructions over the phone on how to go about completing the challenge. And a couple of hours later, I got a mail from him also. He told me that it was really easy to attach an image and send it across. The challenge was to click an image from the E75 and send it as an attachment to me and I had to reply back.

The whole process took him hardly anytime he said, the only time it took him was when he had to find the image, that’s it!

Since my technophobe is busy conducting a workshop/management program for some people, the photo I got was of the room where he was conducting the workshop. Not exactly scenic, but the important thing is to be able to attach images, documents, etc and mail it across from the phone, something my technophobe has learnt very quickly.

I must also inform that my technophobe and me are experiencing some issues with the inbuilt Nokia Messaging (Nokia Email Service). It is behaving a bit erratically. There have been occasions when it has refused to download mail and the passwords seem to  have been deleted on its own. Overall, it the Nokia Messaging solution on our devices at least, is not stable enough. It works, but not without throwing tantrums.

To know more about Teach the Technophobe and see how others are faring. click here.

Teach the Technophobe: Challenge 1

As we all know that there is a ‘Teach the Technophobe‘ challenge going on involving 8 brave souls (me included!) where normal average people are taught by us how to use the new smartphones (read E75). This challenge revolves around the E75’s email capabilities.

Having received the E75 first amongst everyone, I had already configured the email capabilities on both the phones long back with a few hiccups. And since I have used this device for quite sometime, I’m aware of the quirks of this device by now.

Around this time I also moved to a new place, NOIDA for work and as a result there has been a lot of jumble in my life. Nokia Messaging is the one thing that has kept it going for me.

For this challenge, I gave my technophobe instructions on first re-setting the device(*#7370#) to it’s original settings after he took a back up of his important data. Starting afresh I had him configure his mailbox on the E75 and send me a WOM World a test mail. All this took about close to an hour. Setting up the Email and sending a test mail was easy and took only 15-20 minutes.

With this the first challenge is up. I don’t have photos of the same as I’m in NOIDA and my technophobe is back in Pune.

That’s the update from my end. I’m awaiting my next challenge!

How to Configure ‘Messaging’ on your E75

Having received the E75, I have been wanting to configure the Nokia Messaging, which was supposedly built into the phone’s OS.

But it wasn’t meant to be. Since the 18th till a little while ago, I had a lot of problems making the application work like it should. Firstly for some reason I was directed to the native client of the E75. This client was absolutely pathetic and does not work properly. Inspite of giving intervals of 5 minutes between two syncs, it would not sync. I would have to manually fire up the synchronization process and that also did not work properly. If it did manage to download the email, the notification would not go off. There were all sorts of problems with this phone, so much so that I had absolutely given up on this device. I wrote to everybody, asked all my blogger friends (thanks for all the help guys! I really appreciate it!) even put it on Nokia’s discussion forum. But nothing.

Let me tell you, that Nokia’s native client for email sucks big time. I absolutely hate it. Now you must be wondering, how do I know what am I using? Well, it’s simple really.

1. Go to the ‘Email’ icon on your phone’s menu, there select ‘Settings’ and in that you will find ‘Global Settings’ and the settings for your email box(es). Just select any mailbox and if you see ‘Mailbox Settings’ and ‘Account settings’, then you are definitely using Nokia Messaging and not the old native client.

If you find none of the above settings, it means you are using the native client and chances are it is not at all working properly. If in case you are wondering, what to do? Worry not. Below is what you need to do to get your mailboxes working on Nokia Messaging. This is a step by step guide of what you should do.

[The portion in yellow color are the precise steps, the writing in bold are my observations when I tried them on the E75.]

The highlighted icon would appear to be the new Email/Messaging client.

I suspect you’ve ended up with a configuration where the service initially failed or timed out somehow and ended up configuring the native client as a default.

Not sure if the following steps will work for you but this is what has worked for me in the past.

1. Uninstall Nokia Messaging using the Application Manager. (It is a 1kb file)

2. Reboot (power cycle) the phone

3. Uninstall Nokia Messaging’s left over bits using the Application Manager

4. Reboot the phone.

5. Sign up afresh at the Nokia site: email.nokia.com with a working gmail id.(In case you have an account on ‘www.email.nokia.com’, just log in with that on the PC)

6. Ask the website to send you an SMS with the client download URL. This is important, and made a world of difference to me (I did not have to open the message, the phone automatically started the Nokia Messaging setup for me and asked me for my password of ‘www.email.nokia.com’ account.)

7. Fire up the phone client. Hopefully the initial gmail id you specified in step5 works. Play with it.

8. If it works, start adding other email ids using the phone client.

That’s it. This is all you need to do to get all your mailboxes working like you want them to. Remember the minimum interval time in this application is 10 minutes. The phone automatically syncs with your mailbox and alerts every time there is an new email in your mailbox.

These steps were put up on a Nokia Discussion Forum thread, where I had shared my mailbox woes. ‘sanjaymehta‘ a member on the forum posted his comment which gave precise steps on how to make Nokia Messaging work on the E75. I tried them and it worked!

Now my only questions are, Why has this not been put up so prominently anywhere, either the manuals, online, etc.? What was Nokia thinking, when it conveniently omitted to put this information in the hands of the users of the service and phone?

I think it was extremely ‘unprofessional’ to do this act. It is ironic too, the business phones meant for ‘professionals’ had this problem. I had almost written off this device if it were not for sanjaymehta’s help.

Please make the changes Nokia to all your manuals and other refernce material and even the in phone help or endure the bad publicity for your brilliant device.