My feeble attempt at a Blackberry

I have been salivating over Blackberry’s ever since I seemed to be the only person not to have one. While I don’t do tons of communication, I love to be connected (oddly enough, what prompted me to write about this today was the massive Blackberry outage that has been going on for the past twelve hours). Even back in the late 90’s when I carried around a pager, I set up a system so I could read the first few words of an email on the tiny 40 character LCD screen.

Nowadays, the closest thing I have to a Blackberry is my LG VX8300 cell phone. While I love Verizon service in terms of reliability, I hate the software they use for their phones – namely BREW. Other phone companies use open source Java, which means when companies like Google offers mobile applications of things like Google Calendar, you can download it (for free) and use it (for free). Verizon would have none of this “free” business though.

So what’s a cheapskate like me to do? Find a way to access my email without paying $15 a month (or more) for a neutered service like vCast. Thanks to the guys over at Howard Forums, this was actually pretty simple.

See on a Verizon phone, like most any cell phone, you can access the mobile web. Through this mobile web you can get useful information while mobile like movie times, stock quotes, and email. Unfortunately, you have to pay a pretty penny for data access when you access the web through Verizon’s servers.

Luckily, there’s a way around this. By accessing the service menu in your phone, you can change the IP address that the phone connects to when trying to access the web. You instead change that IP to your own computer. Then, you can install a proxy server (I use HoTTProxy) which serves as the middle-man between your phone and the internet. Since you aren’t connecting to Verizon’s servers, they can’t keep track of your data usage. Instead, you just get billed for airtime minutes, which at least for me are plentiful. So now I can access any mobile webpage I want for free.

One other little trick I love doing through this is sending free text messages. I pay $10/mo for text messages – on just ONE of my shareplan phones! I can’t imagine actually paying $20/mo to be able to send 1 or 2 kilobyte sized messages over my phone. So what I’m able to do instead is log into GMail mobile and send an email to @vtext.com – for free.

Speaking of Gmail, this was one of the major reasons I switched to it. I previously used a SMTP server to be able to access my email from any of my computers, but couldn’t find a single way to access SMTP email over a cell phone. Gmail provides me with a central place for my email, all with a great mobile interface.