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2023-05-06
I have already been a user of a Blackberry Classic / Q20 for a year.
I described some of my experiences about it in wiki page on my wiki.
I consider the thing unfininished there, it will improve when I will compare it more against other reasonable options of QWERTY internet-enabled PDAs.
The phone I will describe in this post is not one of those reasonable options, hence I am writing only one-off here.
Existence of Series 40 QWERTY phones intrigued me and I bought a Nokia Asha 302. I thought I could use it for productivity like I enjoyed the T9/keypad Nokia E52. I even thought ProfiMail was a J2ME app since I thought it felt like one - but it turned out Symbian.
As I knew from Series 60 Nokia E52, I didn't want to use the built-in client. I presumed it would be usable, just not too comfortably.
The phone is so much much smaller than the Blackberry Classic. It feels so miniature in comparison. A different era.
Funny thing, at first when I enabled dictionary autocorrect suggestions, it kept suggesting me words which were wrong with "ni" syllabe replaced by "mi".
First off, it was good to know the default code allowing for factory reset - 12345 worked as first guess.
It turned out that software updates can't be downloaded anymore, so I guessed I would have to play with Nokia Suite PC Companion later. I found a firmware dump forum thread, from which I learnt that my 14.26 version must be a bit old considering the presence of a firmware dump 14.78.
I was intrigued by the possible update since in 2015 the S40 were supposed to get preinstalled Opera Mini 4.5
However, I could still install Opera Mini 8 by going to m.opera.com on the phone browser, just had to pick an unsigned package version as the OS complained about it having had expired, telling me about the clock setting, which was correct however.
So I got Opera Mini 8. Works great. However, it inserts pop-ups of ads during browsing. You need to move the virtual mouse to tap the button to leave an ad. Maybe it would go away if I'd log in to Opera Link.
Of SSH clients, I found JCTerm and MidpSSH. The former appears experimental, the latter quite mature and functional.
However finding the former isn't easy despite the website being right there. But it can be found:
Apparently there is a VNC-over-SSH client compiled, haven't tried them yet, and the SSH client didn't want to connect for me.
I did however manage to install MidpSSH easily with the links on the site. Haven't tried it yet, however. I just saw that it can generate a private key taking a brief moment to do so when I turned publickey auth on, seemed to be ready for use.
I must admit that it was lovely how an ordinary USB mass storage device could be plugged in *on top* of the device. Felt like I could use it like that a lot.
But then I turned to look for J2ME email clients. First I found a mention of Mobiquus
When I finally found a working jar on the atrocious dertz.in portal, the login screen seemed awful and single-user and I ditched it, distrustful of the file even.
Then I found that there was a past "Funambol" or "Sync4J" - an app with a server companion, that they were providing hosting of.
At last I found mujMail. At first having found an old version, I ended up reaching
That actually turned out to be a working thing, but ultimately turned out to be not enough just because I couldn't browse IMAP folders in it.
I tried installing a jar of an old version of LogicMail made for Blackberry, but it turned out to fail to find some classes, being made for Blackberry.
Then I was exploring into SmartMail, which however ended up being just a client for DoveSmart service (the domain dovesmart.com is now peculiarly taken over by Chinese porn spam)
There I at last found it.
I was also going through apps threads on some Polish forum nokiahacking.pl
I think it might have been there where at some point I found about jMailAgent. JMail being a library, I thought it was an IMAP client. I dug. I found an old version of it on Chomikuj, only download of it not in a big package that I would have to pay to download
I dug.
Made by "Pilgrim", "piligrim275 (at) mail.ru", "https://piligrim.wapland.org".
I learned that WapLand was now defunct but what a place it once was
I dug.
And so I reached version 1.0.5 of it. Further than the supposedly last 1.0.4 that vkontakte-spy post mentioned.
It turned out to actually not have an English version. I thought that oh well, the best email client may end up being Russian-only.
Except I was constantly disregarding the mail.ru dedications in all descriptions - and I thought it just meant that it worked with IMAP and you didn't have to use GMail or whatever, having low expectations of people.
It turned out to not even be an email client. The more I looked the more I realized that it was entirely a chat app. I learned about what protocol it uses, even.
I gave up.
I acknowledged the built-in clients were the way to go.
I did read before about it being Nokia Messaging in those apps.
It is peculiar how I never noticed Nokia Messaging was supposedly a proxy for email on my Nokia E52. I never created an account. I must have done something to accidentally circumvent that. It wasn't that long ego.
Because. It turned out on Series 40, Nokia Messaging was a barrier not to overcome. These phones apparently just don't actually employ an IMAP client directly *at all*. Considering how reviews mention that they have an IMAP client, this feels like such a lie.
Trying to read up on the topic, of course more Symbian S60 content mixed in, like instructions to circumvent Nokia Messaging
And finally I got to the news:
> Microsoft is killing existing Nokia services one after another and this time it is the Nokia Messaging Service (aka. NMS). Devices which made use of NMS to send and receive emails will stop syncing the mailboxes starting November 17th as Microsoft decides to kill the service. However, the kill doesn’t affect all existing Nokia phones equally.
> Nokia Asha and S40 Phones (excluding Asha 5xx Series)
> The Mail app will become completely useless on the Nokia Asha and Series 40 devices starting November 17th [year 2014] as it will fail to sync with the mailbox and fetch or send any new mails. Users however will be able to access their mailboxes using the web interface of their mail providers, but that isn’t as easy and quickly accessible as was the Mail app.
The article section is accompanied by a screenshot showing that the app back then was announcing discontinuation on November 17th, 2014, telling the user to learn how to read email on their phones from now on, on the website, http://nms.nokia.com/em/s
Turns out however that it was just an instruction to go open webmail on the phone. Um, What.
I know that on my S60 Nokia E52 I must have used it without Nokia Messaging since it must have been already shut down. So I'm glad I wasn't sending Nokia/Microsoft my credentials anymore hopefully.
Next up for me are Series 80 Symbian devices. And some more modern Symbian devices with a slider QWERTY keyboard. And especially, some Java-enabled non-Nokia (so, they might have email working and sufficiently usable hopefully) feature phones with a QWERTY keyboard in the same form factor. My friends say that DankPods calls this the "me too" era since everyone seemed trying to show that they can Blackberry, or any other things for that matter, too.
The country starts seeing 3G shutdowns. This Asha here supports 3.5G so is included in that. The Blackberry Classic can into 4G LTE and can still be a hotspot and stuff, however I now again use my Android as a hotspot now that I got 5G in it that surprisingly often has be in range, and an offer with very high data transfer limits in it too. Will I be okay on EDGE with my email? I feel like I might be, and I can't wait to see. Of course, I will keep picking the devices that also had WiFi.
What I can't wait is to be able to do cool new stuff with such a PDA-function-oriented phone as a modem or whatever over IrDA with a Palm OS palmtop i carry.
If I still have Nokia Asha 302 misnamed as Nokia Ashe 302 somewhere in the post, sorry. I've entered a new relationship a bit over a month ago and my girlfriend's names are Luna Ashe.
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