Saturday, February 21, 2009

GPRS, GPRS BSNL

Finally, after tons of effort, we got BSNL running on the Gphone. The call center had no clue and made me run on wild geese chases. But finally, I tinkered with the manual settings and managed to get it running both on the Gphone as well as an older Nokia.

What are the settings?

On this page, there is a link that gives manual settings for devices. The South Zone link is here...

Take a look at it carefully and configure it as they say. If it works, great. If it does not tinker. I mean, if your number is a Category A, try the B settings and vice versa. Right now, my phone is working on a combination of these settings...All the best

Update: https is not working yet. Have to figure out why that is so.

Friday, February 20, 2009

First things first...

First, we had to lay our hands on a T1 developer phone. Having done that, it was a challenge getting it to work on the local networks. BSNL gave us so much trouble - you can get more if you talk to a wall. So we gave up on BSNL and switched to Airtel. So, Airtel it is for now. Now, a word on Airtels GPRS services - fast, blazing fast. We loved it. Customer service while way better than BSNL, could do with improvement. But that is as far as Indian cellphone networks go...

Coming back to the Gphone, this phone is nice - best of all it is open source. And it will develop its own set of fans. And why not. Just that the battery could be better than what it is today - especially when the GPRS is always on. And since then, we have been at it. Downloading apps, trying them out. Remember that this phone is not yet launched in India, but a phone like this has trememdous potential. It is not yet launched in India and that should happen anytime...

The app market is a treat. There are hundreds and thousands of apps for you to chose from. Games, Recipes, Finance and what have you. And the phone reaffirms something - Software is king in this phone. Don't like something? Go ahead and customise it, change it, the way you would want it. And that is unlike any cellphone by and large - though by now most cellphones are going the open source way and the applications way. 

So, join us on the Android journey...As they say, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

Monday, February 16, 2009

Boot up


The phone does take a little long time to boot up. Not sure if this is because this is a dev phone. But beyond the boot up screen, it requires a data connection for it to be configured over the next steps. So, that was an important lesson for us. A longer story on how we did it, next...

Wednesday, February 11, 2009