T-Mobile GPRS with a Palm Tungsten T5
I picked up a Palm Tungsten T5 a few weeks ago in an effort to get more organized. It features on board Bluetooth so I figure it will make a nice mobile web browser since I carry my smartphone everywhere and T-Mobile has great & cheap GPRS data coverage.
Unfortunately I found the Palm default configuration wizard for T-Mobile US GPRS networking doesn’t work quite right; however, with a bit of tinkering I was able to get it working. Here is what I did to get it working:
- Run the Setup Devices wizard to pair the Palm with your phone handset - mine is a Nokia 3650
- on each device set the other to trusted so future pairings can happen automatically
- since I have T-Mobile as a service provider I selected the T-Mobile US GPRS as a data provider in the wizard
- once the wizard completes you need to edit a few things as the default settings do not seem to work correctly - at least they don’t with my $2.99 T-Zones WAP plan
- Open the Bluetooth preferences
- under Network Service select Edit Network Service
- Select Windows RAS as your network service
- enter nokia as the user name
- enter a space in the password field - apparently Palm OS is dumb and can not handle a blank password so this keeps it from prompting you on each connection attempt
- select the connection you made earlier when you paired your phone
- enter *99# in the phone number field
- hit done and set Windows RAS to the default network service
- once this is complete your Tungsten should be able to connect to the Internet via GPRS on your phone handset
On my service plan (the $2.99/month T-Zones WAP) non-WAP browsing is blocked by default. Fortunately this is easy to remedy you simply need to configure the proxy in Blazer Browser (options -> preferences -> advanced -> set proxy ) to use the T-Mobile proxy server @ 216.155.165.50 on port 8080. I figured out how to get that working a while ago when they started blocking port 80 requests. IMAP / IMAPS connections should work without a problem.
Hopefully this helps someone in the future.
It has been working great for me - the Tungsten has a nice big display and the browser does a pretty good job of rendering content. It beats the hell out of the Nokia WAP browser on my phone and even Opera for Series 60 which seems to lock up or run out of memory every 2 minutes.
