Ocasta

Mobile Tech have a good article on accessing GMail from Series 60 phones. My experiences have been a little different so I thought I'd note them down.

The standard Series 60 mail client on Series 60 v2 phones such as the 6630 and 7610 works, althought the 6600 does not. The client can be configured for POP over SSL (Mailbox, Settings, Security - On). Although the GMail instructions indicate that TLS is necessary to connect to the SMTP server I didn't find it so when I tried. Of course, Google may change this and implement security at any time.

I tried Profimail last week and it didn't support SSL. This week it does! Well done to Lonely Cat for a quick update.

Whichever method you use, you may get the Untrusted certificate message whenever you connect to the GMail server. I tried two identical 7610's and one happily accepted the certificate and one didn't! If you do get this message then it can be overcome by installing the Thawte SSL Domain certificate. You can downloaded it from here.

Although Mobile Tech were having problems with the GMail atom feed, it still seems to be working for me.

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Tried and tested successfully with

• Nokia 6600
  
• Nokia 7610
  
• Sony Ericsson P900/P910 (when the Equifax certificate is installed)
  
• Orange C500
  
• Treo 600
  

Thanks to Vasanth & Eric for feedback.

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I thought it was time that I investigated loading certificates onto phones. The driving force for this was that while trying GMailChecker on a number of handsets I discovered that some, the Nokia 6230 for instance, don't give the option to connect to an HTTPS URL when it has an untrusted certificate.

I ran into a number of problems, some of which I managed to overcome.

• You can't just Bluetooth or SMS a certificate on to a phone. It has to be OTA from a web page.
• When you set up a certificate for download in has to be a binary one, not BASE64
• Many non-smartphones only accept WTLS certificates. This is a problem for GMail since I can't find a WTLS version of the Equifax certificate. So I still can't get the midlet to run on a Series 40 phone.

I now have a web page that you can use to download and install the correct X509 DER encoded Equifax certificate onto your phone. As I said, only some phone supports this type of certificate. It can be found by pointing the phone browser at http://www.ocasta.co.uk/cert.html Successfull installation and configuration means one less question each time you check your GMail.

So far the Series 60 MIDP 2.0 phones I have tried (6600 & 7610) both install it successfully. After installation you have to go to Settings, Security, Certificates; select the Equifax one and under Options set it to trusted for Internet connections. Done.

There was an added bonus too. I found that I could install the certificate on the Sony Ericsson P900/P910. Once installed, the midlet no longer crashes. GMailChecker now works on this phone! However I can't get the browser to install the midlet OTA. For now it has to be installed via a PC.

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With the release of more new phones yesterday Nokia also published a press release outlining the future of the Series 60 platform.

Series 60 will extend to both volume mid-range and high-end categories, becoming a truly scalable and feature-rich platform.
...
Scalability of Series 60 for multiple device categories will result in maximal number of available applications, maximal interoperability and compliancy.

Clearly this is as much a branding exercise as a technical one. Series 60 has been around for around three years and has the highest profile of all the Nokia smartphone platforms. But as a developer it scares me.

As much as I like the Series 60 phones they have, to date, been a bit of a nightmare as a development platform. In particular the when it comes to cross-platform compatability. My current project has been required to operate across most of the Series 60 range - 3650, 3660, Siemens SX-1, 6600, 7610 & the forthcoming 6630. I know that some of these use different Symbian OS version and are therefore not expected to be entirely compatable, but these six phones supposedly only fall into two of Nokia's Developer Platforms. According to this document compatibility exists within a given Developer platform. I beg to differ.

So far each phone has behaved differently and required code changes. There have been many causes, here are some of them:

• Key features (http support!) missing in Symbian 6.1
• Features not working as advertised (all versions)
• API's changed or stop working between phones
• Memory managment varies between phones

We aren't even doing anything particularly complex - no DRM, no audio, no 3D. On top of that Symbian signing is required for each version we ship. Maybe now you start to see why a greater variety of Series 60 devices worries me.

I don't expect Nokia to fix these problems over night. But if Nokia want the developer community to build applications that work across many Series 60 devices I do hope that they will start to focus on platform compatability (backwards and sideways). When I upgrade my PC from one Windows or OSX release to the next most of my applications continue to work. Even Lifeblog doesn't run on the 6630 I have in front of me.

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