Moto Rokr E6

At the time of leaving the Good Technology Group in motorola, and joining up in Symantec , I had a dilema. I needed a new phone. You see, in GTG, since we were developing on mobile phones, and all the time i was there (almost 2 years) , i never needed a phone. I was using Treos mostly - touchscreen, qwerty keyboard, etc. Now, I had to figure out what phone to use.

Nokia is the prevalent choice in India. But, essentially its the same stuff that has been there for ages. My main criteria was a touchscreen phone, and the ones that were coming close to what i wanted was quite prohibitively expensive. At the same time, being a Moto employee, we get discounts on the mobiles there. Had a look at the portfolio, and the one I liked was the moto rokr E6. Not a great phone by any means, but since it was linux based, had FM and a touch screen with a 2MP camera, and almost half the cost of the next contender in line ( the HTC touch), i bought it.

The plain vanilla phone is not that high on features. It has its drawbacks a plenty, like scrolling your music collection takes ages. Some of the issues are addressable, some are not. Here are things which you can do with your phone. Some of it requires messing with your phone ... so, if you like messing with things, you are gonna enjoy this phone !

EDGE

Frankly, most things that you can do with a phone go beyond the sms and phone apps. Now, you can be connected online all throughout the day using a data connection. The hitch here is that the E6 comes with only a GPRS connection (48kbps ~ 6kB per sec of data). Now , this is ok if you like living life in the slow lane, but what we really want is an EDGE connection ( 236kbps ~ 29kB of data per sec). So, the first thing you want to do is to get EDGE working. Unfortunately, on this phone, EDGE is disabled by default!

This is where the wide user community comes to the rescue. Googling for EDGE (especially since a couple of my friends had already done the updates) threw up direction on the moto mod community. Its been made really easy, just need to have the correct software installed.

• Making the rokr E6 EDGE capable

NOTE : you need a data connection on your mobile phone. If you call up the service center and ask for EDGE , they will in all probability not know what you are talking about. Tell them you want a data connection for your mobile, and it should do the trick.

Spicing it up

Now, i started looking around for software to go with it. With GMM I always had email at my disposal. But, since that is a corporate software, I needed something similar but for personal use. Google Mail to the rescue ! gmail for the mobile is quite easy to use, and almost similar to the version you see using a desktop. It is possible to browse the emails through the web browser, but gmail gives a much better presentation, and also is faster than the web version for the mobile. The only glitch, the latest version does not work on the mobile ! sigh! So, you need to get an older version.

• Download gmail 1.1 for mobile from here.
  

Next, since I am always travelling, download the google maps application from google.

• Google Maps

Another nifty thing is Morange. Its a kind of all in one tool. With it you can read RSS ( a severly stripped down version though, which I find really frustrating), and also chat using any of the usual chat clients.

• Morange (www.morange.com)

(A friend suggests fring, but it does not work on the rockr).

Hope this helps all who have a E6 and wondering what all they can do with it.

PS : Thanks to arpan and alok for pointing out the site for EDGE.