Motorola V600, Wireless Internet, Bluetooth And The Macintosh

Part 1 — Setting Up Email On The Motorola V600 Phone

1. Bring up the “Messages” menu on your cellphone.
2. Press the “Menu” button to enter “Msg Center Menu”.
3. Select “Email Msg Setup”.
4. Change the “ISP Settings” to this:Connection Type: GPRS
   APN Address: WAP.CINGULAR
   Username: WAP@CINGULARGPRS.COM
   Password: CINGULAR1
   DNS IP: 66.209.10.201

The rest of the settings, you’ll need to supply yourself. As I was informed many times by many different Cingular people, they don’t give you an email address. You can use IMAP4 or POP3 to talk to your account. Obviously you’ll need to know the Username and Password for your email account. You’ll also need what they call a “Sending Host” and a “Receiving Host”.

The “Sending Host” is the SMTP server. You’ll need access to an open one. Many SMTP servers only offer access from their own domain. Unfortunately, if you need to supply more than a standard address like “smtp.yourhost.com”, it won’t work with the phone. I first tried to set it up with my .Mac account, but that requires “smtp.mac.com:username” and the phone doesn’t like it. Actually Cingular does have an SMTP server you can use “photo.mycingular.com” but be warned that it will stamp a message at the bottom of all your emails:

============================================================

Photo Messaging brought to you by Cingular Wireless http://www.cingular.com.
You can send the sender of this email a Text Message by simply replying to this message.

The “Receiving Host” is usually called the “Mail Server” or “Incoming Mail Server” by most email software. Put the appropriate info in that field. And don’t forget to fill out the “Return Address” field with your email address. I don’t think it derives it from the other fields.

That’s it. (Actually there are other settings like whether or not to download attachments, saving copies on the server, etc. but those are up to you.) Once you have that info in, you make a new email under the “Create Message” menu, and you can check your mail under the “Email Msgs” menu. Not too hard. And you have some big benefits. You won’t be using up any of your SMS or MMS quotas, and people will see an address that they’re used to—not “phonenumber@mms.mycingular.com”. (That address works, by the way. You can receive emails as MMS messages on your phone if people send to that address. Well it works if you replace “phonenumber” with your actual 10-digit number. Hopefully that was pretty obvious. Any mail received through that address will count against your quota as an MMS message. But it does support attachments. Plain text email can be sent to the phone through “phonenumber@mobile.mycingular.com”. This will count against your SMS quota.)

I should also note that there is that other APN address, ISP.CINGULAR, and a couple different usernames to go with it. Those didn’t work on my phone. Only the WAP one did. I called Cingular back after getting it to work and explained everything to them and asked if the connection would be faster if I could use the other APN. The person I talked to couldn’t really say. And frankly, I was so happy to have it working, I moved on. If anyone else knows and knows what I should say to the Cingular people, I would appreciate a comment.

[Update: I have since figured out that the ISP.CINGULAR APN address is for their Data Connect service which uses the EGPRS (EDGE) network. This has faster speeds, up to 128kbps, but only for devices that support it. Not the V600. The Data Connect plans are much more expensive than the Wireless Internet Express plans. So if your phone only supports standard GPRS you might as well stick with Wireless Internet Express.]

Part 2 — Pairing The V600 To Your Mac With Bluetooth

This one is not too difficult either but it’s easy to get it mixed up because there are two different ways to do it. The first thing you need to do is delete the pairing with the phone if one already exists. If you’ve been having trouble with it dropping the connection when you don’t want it too, this should fix it. So delete away. You can also delete the pairing on the phone side by going under “Settings” to “Connection”, selecting “Bluetooth” and going under “Device History”. Select the computer, press the “Menu” button and select “Delete”. Now you’re ready to begin.

On the Mac, bring up your System Preferences and go into the Bluetooth pane. Make sure that “Support Non-Conforming Phones” is checked in the “Settings” tab. You might also want to check “Show Bluetooth status in the menu bar”. That menu will make things easier. That’s it with the preferences. You can close up System Preferences.

Under the Bluetooth menu in the menu bar that you justed turned on, select “Set up Bluetooth Device”. (You can also run the program “Bluetooth Setup Assistant” in your Utilities folder. Same thing.) Go through this whole assistant doing whatever it asks. Before you move off the first page though, you need to make your cellphone discoverable.

Settings -> Connection -> Bluetooth -> Setup -> Find Me

Now back on the computer, run through the rest of the setup assistant. You’ll have to respond to a few things on your computer and on the phone so keep it handy. One of the last things the assistant will ask you is if you want to set up the phone for wireless internet. Go ahead and say “yes”. We’ll refine this a bit in Part 3. You’ll need those WAP settings from Part 1. Make sure you enter the APN, WAP.CINGULAR, where it asks for the “Telephone Number”. Select any modem script, you’ll change it later.

Now you’re paired. You might want to set Bluetooth to “On” on your phone. It’s in that same Setup screen that you made the phone discoverable.

So what can you do now that you’re paired?

[Update: iSync 1.5 supports the V600 but through a USB cable, not Bluetooth.]

One thing you can’t do is iSync. I know. I know. Cry your heart out. I’m sure Apple will add support at some point, but they haven’t yet. You’ll deal. Trust me. The easiest way to get your addresses into the phone is like this:

1. Create a new group in Address Book and call it “Mobile” or “Cellphone” or whatever.
2. Drag all the addresses on you want on your phone into it. (You can’t do much more with this group right now. It’s basically just for organization, but in the future when iSync supports the V600, you can sync the whole group.)
3. Select the first address in your group.
4. Under the “Card” menu select “Send This Card”.
5. Select your cellphone from the list that pops up.
6. Accept the vCard on your cellphone.
7. Repeat at step 3 as necessary.

You can only do one address at a time. You can select several at once if you want but only the first one will be imported into the phone. If any of your addresses are listed as a Company with the little building icon in Address Book, they won’t go over to the phone correctly. The “Name” field on the phone only reads the “Name” field on the vCard—not the “Company” field when the “Name” field is empty. You’ll either have to enter these manually or change the way they’re named in Address Book.

Another things you can do is send files back and forth to the phone. The easiest way to do this is to select “Browse Device” from the Bluetooth menu in the menu bar. Select your phone from a list. A new “Browsing” window will pop up in which you’ll see three folders on your phone—audio, picture and video. Want to guess what goes in each? If you take any pictures with the built-in camera on the phone, you’ll find them in the “picture” folder.

You can put MP3s in the audio folder and use them as ringtones, but let me make a few suggestions. You only have 5MB total memory on the phone. That’s for the address book, MP3s and other ringtones, pictures, plus any games or other software you might have downloaded to it. Keep the MP3s small. Use an audio editor to trim your song or sound to 15 to 20 seconds. I would strongly suggest making them mono MP3s at 64kbps (or less). If you’re using iTunes to make the MP3s, select “Custom” on the Importing tab of the prefences. Set the Stereo Bit Rate to 128kbps if you want a 64kbps mono file. Make sure VBR is unchecked. And under Channels select Mono.

There are programs that can do things with the phone now that you’re paired. OnSync will sync addresses between Address Book and your phone. It didn’t work very well for me. Maybe you’ll have better luck. I found the “Send This Card” method in the Address Book did what I needed it to. GSM Remote and BluePhoneMenu will also do various things. Maybe something there catches your fancy.

Part 3 — The V600 As A Bluetooth Modem On The Mac

The moment you’ve all been waiting for… internet from anywhere with your Mac laptop. First you’ll need some new modem scripts. Download these from Ross Barkman’s homepage. Copy them into /Library/Modem Scripts.

The rest is a bunch of settings.

1. Bring up “System Preferences” and select the “Network” pane.
2. Select “Bluetooth” from the “Show” menu.
3. Under the “TCP/IP” tab, make sure that Configure IPv4 is set to “Using PPP”.
4. Under the “PPP” tab, you’ll need to use the WAP settings from Part 1. They’re probably already filled in from when you ran the Setup Assistant in Part 2. But double-check anyway:Service Provider: Cingular
   Account Name: WAP@CINGULARGPRS.COM
   Password: CINGULAR1
   Telephone Number: WAP.CINGULAR
5. Click the “PPP Options” button.
6. Uncheck “Send PPP echo packets” and “Use TCP header compression”.
7. Under the “Proxies” tab, you shouldn’t have to change anything. No proxies.
8. Under the “Bluetooth Modem” tab, set the Modem to “Motorola GPRS CID1”. This is the one that worked for me. There are several that came with the downloaded scripts that you could try. Some people have also reported success with the “Motorola iR Timeport (7089)”
9. Uncheck “Enable error correction and compression in modem”.
10. Uncheck “Wait for dial tone before dialing”.
11. Click “Apply Now” and close the System Preferences.

You should be good to go now. Make sure you don’t have a current internet connection. Turn off your Airport if you have one. Put the computer to sleep. Unplug your ethernet cable if that’s how you are online. Wake the computer back up.

You need to run Internet Connect to dial-in with a modem (Bluetooth or otherwise). You’ll find it in your Applications folder. Click on the Bluetooth tab. Select “Cingular” from the Configuration menu. Click the “Connect” button. In a moment you should be online wirelessly.

Obviously this is slower than a broadband connection, infact it’s slower than a 56K modem. It’s about the speed of a 28.8K modem. You’ll probably want to limit the amount of downloading you do. You can tell Safari to not load images by unchecking “Display images when the page opens” in the “Appearance” tab under preferences. If you’re using .Mac or another IMAP-based email account, you’ll need to select “Synchronize” under the “Mailbox” menu to keep local copies of your email for offline reading.

So there you go. Hopefully some people find this helpful. If anyone has any other comments, suggestions, tips, tricks, questions, etc. please leave a comment below.

Update: July 30, 8:15 PM —

Ok, I must be foolish or something but I was concerned. After posting this, I went around to some of the websites that I referenced to see if I could add trackbacks or comments to generate a little more traffic. (Hey, we all like to have visitors.) I noticed a comment at the Unofficial Apple Weblog page that I have listed above, that mentioned that the WAP settings I’ve used are a “pay as you go” service. That person talked to a “tier two tech” at Cingular and had things setup properly using ISP.CINGULAR. I was concerned that even though I signed up for the $20/month unlimited media package, I would get a bill for all these connections through WAP. I spent a lot more time on hold, a lot of explaining what I was trying to do to “tier one” customer service trying to get them to transfer me. They finally did.

I talked to a very, very knowledgable and nice tier two tech who told me about some of their options. It sounds like they’re only just now setting up plans to cover this whole idea of outside email through your cellphone and connecting to the internet on your laptop through your phone. The MEdia packages that they’re offering right now are just for specific cellphone-based services like shopping at the Cingular Mall and going online through the phone’s browser. The data connect plans they have right now are rather expensive for not much data. Basically she said that the WAP settings I’m using right now shouldn’t work. It’s just a bonus that they are.

“But my understanding is that it’s a ‘pay as you go’ setting. Is there a bunch of data traffic on my bill? Am I going to get billed the $20 for the ‘MEdia’ package plus extra for this WAP stuff?”

She looked at my bill. “No, none of it has shown up. Because it doesn’t work, right?”

“Oh, of course not. I am not able to connect to the internet on my laptop through my phone. Thank you so much for all your help.”

So I don’t know what the deal is. Everyone who calls up seems to get told something different. I suspect that they will finalize their policy on all of this at some point soon. And at some point my unlimited data connect service for $20 will stop working—or at least I’ll have to start paying for it.

[Update: The deal is the Wireless Internet Express versus Data Connect that I’ve mentioned in my other “Update” boxes throughout this post.]

Anyone have any different stories?

Update: July 31, 3:15PM —

Another note about things. I was prowling around in the guts of my phone (the software guts, not the hardware ones). I was looking for a way to setup web bookmarks. Let’s face it, text entry on a cellphone is not exactly all that fun. Yes, Cingular is nice enough to let you setup bookmarks on the My Wireless Window webpage that are accessible from your phone, but you have to go through a couple pages to get to them from there. Direct access for some of the key ones is preferable in my book.

I noticed that when you go into WebAccess on the V600, there’s a option called “Web Sessions”. On my phone it was set up with two items: Cingular and MMS. I edited the Cingular setup and lo and behold! It has the same settings that I used for my email and laptop, WAP.CINGULAR and all that. So it seems to me that if the default “Cingular” setup of the internet uses that, it’s very likely that they are the correct settings. And even though the nice tier two tech support woman I talked to said I shouldn’t be able to do what I was doing, I don’t think that’s the case. It seems like a proper GPRS setup to me. Not a pay per use at all—unless that’s the plan that you have. Since I’m on a $20/month unlimited use plan, I shouldn’t have to pay anything extra no matter if I’m surfing the web from my phone, sending email from my phone, or wirelessly connecting my laptop to the internet through the phone.

One advantage that the WebAccess setting had over my email is that it also had settings for CSD dialup—not just the GPRS APN. I’m assuming the advantage would be if I were not in a GPRS zone like LA, and just in a standard digital zone, I could still go online. I would have to change my email settings manually to switch it over to CSD. Those CSD settings are clearly spelled out in that PDF file I linked to above.

And of course I was able to setup my bookmark as well—the actual reason I was poking around at things. All I did was highlight the “Cingular” Web Session, press the “Menu” button, select “Copy Entry” from the menu, give it a new name, and finally go in and edit the setting, giving it the new URL I wanted it to go to. Not too hard.

Update: July 31, 4:15PM —

Ok, I swear this’ll will might be the last update. I think I’ve deciphered the whole network connection methods vs. pricing plan deal at least as far as Cingular goes.

Cingular offers three different types of internet access:

• Wireless Internet
• Wireless Internet Express
• Data Connect

Wireless Internet is their term for the older CSD method of connecting. It runs at about 9kbps and you pay for the access time. Hopefully you don’t have to use this method.

Wireless Internet Express is GPRS running at up to 30kbps. This is the method that most phones now will support. This uses the WAP.CINGULAR APN. On these plans you pay for the amount of data transferred not the amount of time spent. They also offer their MEdia Works package which gives you an unlimited amount of transfers for $20/month.

Data Connect is a EGRPS network, also known as EDGE. This is that extra fast wireless that supports up to about 128kbps. It will of course run at the slower standard GPRS speed if your phone doesn’t support it. This is method uses the ISP.CINGULAR APN. The data connect packages also are billed by the amount of data transferred. Their low-end package is $20/month for 5MB all the way up to their high end of $80/month for unlimited.

Cingular only “officially” supports connecting laptops to the internet through their Data Connect program—which also means you have to be running their software which is Windows only. Yes, it supports that fast EDGE speed but only if your phone supports it. The Motorola V600 does not. So if you have convinced a Cingular tech support person to turn on Data Connect access for you and you don’t have to pay those fees for it, I congratulate you. However if you’re using a V600 phone, you’re not getting any more speed out if it than if you were using the WAP settings.

But as I’ve shown if you use the settings above, you can get still get your laptop online—though in an “unsupported” method—and do it at the rates that they offer on their Wireless Internet Express service. Basically the only advantage in going with Data Connect would be if you had a phone that supported EDGE. Phone Scoop is a good place to look for stats on phones.

Update: August 10, 3:30PM —

Apple has released iSync 1.5 which supports the V600 with a USB data cable—part number SKN6311 from Motorola. I have a post about it here.

Update: August 15, 7:15AM —

A recent reader was looking for Cingular internet settings for his V600. He had the phone with AT&T but had switched to Cingular. He thought others might find it useful so I’m adding it:

Name: Cingular
Homepage: http://device.home
Service Type1: WAP
Gateway IP1: 066.209.011.061
Port1: 9201
Domain1:
Service Type2: WAP
Gateway IP2:
Port2: 0
Domain2:
DNS1:
DNS2:
TimeOut: 10 minutes
CSD No.1: +14152441012
User Name1: WAP@CINGULARGPRS.COM 
Password1: CINGULAR1
Speed(Bps)1: 9600
Line Type1: ISDN
CSD No.2:
User Name2:
Password2:
Speed(Bps)2:
Line Type2:
GPRS APN: wap.cingular
User Name: WAP@CINGULARGPRS.COM
Password: CINGULAR1

These settings are all available in the “Device Settings” document from Cingular that I linked to near the beginning of this page. But here it’s all spelled out for people with V600s. The setup menu for other phones will probably be a bit different. The settings are the same.