Is anyone using $4.99 T-Zones with T-Mobile SDA?

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John - 18 Mar 2006 17:26 GMT

Hi,

I currently have a Sony T610. I have $4.99 T-Zones which I use for
reading IMAP email. I want to get an SDA (for $199 after rebate), but I
don't want to have to pay for a $20/mo or $30/mo data plan.

I'm wondering if anyone is successfully using the SDA with $4.99
T-Zones to check email?

THANKS!
John

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tbcarver@yahoo.com - 19 Mar 2006 04:03 GMT

I bought the SDA and the $4.99 plan for my new phone. However, the
T-Zones never worked. Everyone at the T-Mobile stores swore it should
work, but when I talked to the PDA team at T-Mobile they said the phone
CANNOT do WAP browsing and would not work with the $4.99 plan.

It seems outrageous that they can't do WAP browsing when you have a
full OS running on the phone. They said you could only get email if
you paid for the $20 plan. I'm still steaming over this.

Tyler

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Johnnie Leung - 19 Mar 2006 06:13 GMT

>I bought the SDA and the $4.99 plan for my new phone. However, the
> T-Zones never worked. Everyone at the T-Mobile stores swore it should
> work, but when I talked to the PDA team at T-Mobile they said the phone
> CANNOT do WAP browsing and would not work with the $4.99 plan.

Of course it does WAP *and* work with T-Zones. You just need to have things
set up correctly.

As shipped, the phone only has one APN called 'T-Mobile GPRS', with
'Connects to' and 'Access point' set to 'The Internet' and
'wap.voicestream.com' respectively. This is not enough to do WAP browsing.
You need to add a proxy entry. See
http://www.howardforums.com/showthread.php?t=576307 for details.

> It seems outrageous that they can't do WAP browsing when you have a
> full OS running on the phone. They said you could only get email if
> you paid for the $20 plan. I'm still steaming over this.

I have the $20 plan, but I never download email directly to my phones. It's
much faster and easier to use web mail clients.

JL

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John - 19 Mar 2006 18:47 GMT

I like the $4.99 T-Zones because I can check POP and IMAP email and
send mail via SMTP. I am able to do this from the phone (My T610 has a
built-in email client) and also from my PDA and Laptop via IrDA or
Bluetooth.

This is the essential functionality that I'm looking for. Tyler said
email didn't work with the $4.99 plan on the SDA. I'm surprised.

I do not expect to be able to look at WAP pages with the SDA no matter
what service I have. I know the browser on the SDA is not a WAP
browser, it's an HTML browser. Therefore, I don't expect any browsing
with $4.99 T-Zones without first setting up the proxy. With the proxy,
I expect full browsing.

I hope T-Mobile never disables the proxy. It is the *ONLY* reason why I
continue to have T-Mobile service. In my area Verizon has better
coverage and is only slightly more expensive. However, with $4.99
T-Zones (with proxy), T-Mobile has by-far the best data deal.

John

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tbcarver@yahoo.com - 21 Mar 2006 07:27 GMT

Well after reading the page posted by JL I thought there may be the
possibility of browsing with my SDA on the $4.99 plan. I called
T-Mobile and had them add the service back on to my phone. They stated
that it would not work but that they would add the feature. I then
change my GPRS to WAP connection and added an interent proxy to the
WAP.

WOW, it started to browse. I lost my MMS messaging but T-Mobile helped
me to fix that by changing it to use the WAP connection. I still can't
really access t-zones, I'll keep working on that. In fact, the only
site that really doesn't work well is my.t-mobile.com, which is what
the phone browses to when I use the big T-Zones button on the phone.
An other site is working great though.

Tyler

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Johnnie Leung - 21 Mar 2006 16:59 GMT

> Well after reading the page posted by JL I thought there may be the
> possibility of browsing with my SDA on the $4.99 plan. I called
[quoted text clipped - 9 lines]
> the phone browses to when I use the big T-Zones button on the phone.
> An other site is working great though.

The fact is you need to set up proxies for both WAP and HTTP. To access
HTTP sites without the full Internet plan you need to go through T-Mobile's
proxy server (which you are aware of). But WAP itself makes use of proxies
aka 'gateways'. I don't have the limited data plan so I can't be sure, but
my limited testing suggested that you really need to set up separate access
points ('GPRS connections') and proxy entries for WAP and HTTP. And you
need to tell Windows Mobile's IE that you are accessing a WAP site by using
a 'wsp://' URL.

JL

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