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I’ve come across more than a couple of instances in the recent past (the most recent being prashanth) where people had trouble setting up Mail For Exchange (MFE) on their Nokia S60 devices.  So, I decided to do a step-by-step howto on how to get it installed, setup and running on your S60 phone.

I have used a Nokia 6210 Navigator (S60 FP2 device) for supporting this blog post, but any other S60 3rd edition / 5th edition device would conform to more or less the same process.  Now, here goes…

There are two ways you can start off your setup of MFE on your S60 device:

1. Hunt down the MFE icon hiding somewhere in the Installations / Applicaitons folder and start off the setup process…
2. Start setup from the Messaging app and move forward to install MFE and continue the setup.  We will be looking at this approach in the blog post.

The only difference between the two approaches is that in the first one already has MFE installed on your device and you just go ahead and type in your magic keywords and it just works!  In the second case, you type in the parameters and then it proceeds to install MFE (whose sis file Nokia has happily stored somewhere on your phone) and then apply the magic and get going!!!

So… starting with it…

1. Open the messaging app -> New mailbox.  Select Yes for the question it asks.
   
2. You should now be presented with the E-mail setup wizard.  Start it off… we’re just a few more steps away
   
3. The wizard will then show you a disclaimer.  Just accept it to move to the next step.  It will then check your GPRS (NOT WAP, GPRS = DATA = THE COSTLY WALA CONNEXUN ) connectivity to the internet and then the setup part of your process starts.
   
4. Continuing on… The next set of screens prompts you to enter the Email ID, password.
   
5. At this point, we’re halfway through the process.  The wizard will now show a list of protocols that are “possibly” supported by your email id.  One of them is POP3 / IMAP4 (which is the defacto thingy, but not what we’re interested in) and the other being, Mail For Exchange.  This is shown in the screenshots below:
   
6. Once MFE is selected, you will be presented with dialogues to enter your Windows Username and the Windows Domain Name against which you authenticate yourself in your organization.
   
7. In the next dialog, you have to enter your mail server URL.  This is the URL of the exchange server you have at work.
   
8. At this point, the installation of MFE starts on you system and proceeds to show you the Sync settings menu.
   
9. Pressing the center softkey on the Content synced settings item brings up the detailed settings for your MFE setup that you have done.  Here, you can tweak your Peak, off peak settings, Sync when roaming settings, and all the works…I’ll leave it to the screenshots below to do the explanations…
   
10. Once you are satisfied with the settings changes you have made to the profile, Select Options –> Full resync.  This will clear out any pre-existing sync data and refresh it with the latest data from the exchange server.
    
11. Once the Full sync is done, the MFE profile you just created gets saved and you can see the status of the sync process as it happens.
    
12. After closing the wizard, you must be able to see a Mail for Exchange folder in your Messaging application.  This indicates that you have an MFE profile setup on your phone.  Once the sync is complete from the previous step, you will see a new mail indication on the Home screen as indicated by a small ‘@’ icon in the top right near the battery indicator.
    

    You can haz push corporate emailz!!!

    

13. Another feature that MFE provides is the Company directory lookup.  This is basically the Addressbook feature that Outlook provides when you type the name of the recipient and press Ctrl + K.  The app is named Comp. Dir.
    

So there ends the step-by-step walkthrough for setting up MFE on your S60 devices.

Now comes the interesting part, Troubleshooting.

• If your sync has suddenly stopped working, chances are that your backend has cut you off for a while a.k.a. maintenance.
• Another common issue is the MFE not working after a FOTA upgrade.  This is rectified by deleting your existing MFE profile and creating a new one with the same settings.
• If your MFE setup keeps harping about the server being wrong (step 7 in how-to above), try it with the https://mail.yourmailserver.com url.

I hope this helps someone with regard to setting up MFE.  Until the next post… Chao!

A lot of people down here in India did not even know of the Security flaw in Nokia devices in all probability.  The company called F-Secure, that makes Antivirus software for Symbian phones had demonstrated an SMS based flaw during in Nokia’s devices during the 25th Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin.  You can read about it here, here and see a video of this exploit in action here.

The flaw, named “Curse of Silence” was demonstrated on Nokia’s Series60 2nd Edition, 3rd Edition phones (FP1 included).  It worked this way: People sent a carefully and very very painstakingly typed series of messages to an E-Series / N-Series phone.  And voila, the affected device would stop communicating  with the outside world using SMS.  You could only make / receive voice calls.  And the only known way out for this hack was to hard reset the phone.

What happened as a result of this was the noise in the Nokia forums, which obviously happens…  And then, F-Secure chose to act.  They released a patch for the flaw saying that they could protect the devices if users agreed to shell out 60$ USD for it.  Crazy!

And then the noise level in the forums grew even further, and people started to blast Nokia for making such a mistake in their production devices and then Nokia chose to act.  They just released a free application download which would clean up your phone if your device is infected. And keep you secure.  This also probably answers the various firmware upgrades Nokia has been pushing out for most of its models lately.

What I particularly wanted to point out with this post are the following:

1. The fact that Nokia actually listens to its users.  The security flaw is not major.  If you take a look at the video from the link posted above, it shows how strenuous it is to actually hack into the system.
2. People will always complain.  Listening to the complaints and having to put up with all that noise AND take what is important for both an organization and its customers (loyal and otherwise) is real mastery!
3. It shows one straight thing from the management perspective: You may have the first mover advantage for a situation.  But, when the playground is not yours, you dont get to play according to your rules. F – Secure!
4. F-Secure sucks!!! Nokia needs to stop teaming up with F-Secure and stop listing them in their Download! application.
5. Nokia rocks!
6. Nokia rocks! and, lastly
7. Nokia rocks!!!

So yeah, all is well in the Nokia and Symbian and Smartphones world!   You can continue to send out confidential mail, love-ka-mail and all other sorts of yeee-mail… and listen to “?? ?????? ?? ???? ???…” or any other song of your choice on your cool Nokia phone while getting traffucked in any city that you are in.

But do remember, you do need to periodically backup your phone.  There is the software part that Nokia and its team of hard-working, dedicated, engineers can take care of… And there’s the “idiot using the box” that you can choose / not choose to be.

And, in other unrelated news, Apple’s multitouch patent got through…  I feel really sorry for the Palm-Pre!!! They need some really awesome magic from the Harry Potter world to rewire the stuff!

Last, but definitely not the least, thanks to Ricky Cadden of SymbianGuru for the update / info.

There! Another lovely blog post done!

Google’s native Search application for Nokia devices is out… And it is plain Uber-Kewl!!! Sense and Sensibility! With a couple of questions from my side!!! B-) The application needs to be downloaded from mobile.google.com.

I pulled it up and gave it a test run on my mobile and here are the screen-shots:

The app loads automatically and displays this beautiful image on the screen… Aaaah! bliss!!!

It opens up to the Ctrl key on the E61i / Pencil key on other S60 3rd edition devices.

By the time you enter the search text, the internet connection is initiated in the background. More on this later…

And voila! The search results are displayed using the S60 OSS web browser!

Local Cinema search too!!! We cant book tickets using google yet!

The app integrates maps too…

Driving directions dint work for me though…

 Now that the screen-shots are done, I have my set of questions that I want answers for…

1. The Google search application selects my internet access point all by itself.  It does not have any settings… and the application does not ask me about the access point.  How does it know that I use Mobile Office???
2. Adding to point number 1, the search application basically opens the browser with a parameter being google.com/search?q=’search string‘.  Why does it need to have gprs / wifi running in the background???  The browser on opening proceeds to ask the user about the access point all again…
3. Currently the google search app only searches google.com.  Is in-device search in the pipe???

With that ends a nice blog post after quite some time!!!…

Due credit to bhuwan for the info…  Thanx pal!

The big guy there is opening up the curtains very very soon… 56 hours, 20 minutes to go and counting down as I type in this post!!! Is this the sweet N82??? Or is it some new new thingy???

2 more days to go for another biggie in the phone industry eh???

Engedget has the coverage of the news here…

Tags: Series60, Symbian, Engadget, NSeries, Nokia