Howdy, I’m Phil McClendon. I do product marketing for Nokia’s consumer email and IM solutions across Nokia’s device portfolio and I oversee competitive analysis for email, IM, and social networking solutions I work out of Nokia’s Silicon Valley office. You’ll see me pop up on this blog looking for your comments and feedback or I might show up in a video doing a demonstration of one of Nokia’s products.
The holidays are here and in my family that means coordinating activities with friends and family over email, chat and Facebook really picks up. Most of our family friends have small kids like we do, and so they are always on the go. Add in the grandparents always wanting to see the latest picture of their grandkids dressed up for the holidays and you get lots of back and forth with pictures and forwarded email. Luckily, I use my Nokia N8 with an unlimited data plan to handle all of this. The grandparents on the other hand, are occasional users with only basic data plans. They have complained about extra charges due to going over the plan’s data limits – until I told them how to set his phone for this type of use.
Nokia has always had a focus on efficient data use and we pride ourselves on delivering email, IM and social networking solutions that deliver as much information with as little data as possible – and we have results from independent tests to show it! The graph below highlights the test results when compression rates of a variety of email services were compared. Nokia as well as RIM have invested a lot to ensure data use is optimized over the network.
1 Rysavy Benchmarking results Fall, 2009.
For some, keeping on top of all of your latest emails is crucial. However, we realize that for a lot of people, like my parents, data is an expense, so I would like to share a few handy tips and tricks that I gave them to help keep data costs down when using always online services like email, IM, and social networking.
Settings services to OfflineOne way of keeping costs down is to simply log off from your IM and social networking services. However, keep in mind that this will prevent you from enjoying the benefits of status updates, notifications, messages and so on.
This can be done by simply hitting Exit or Sign out on your chosen app. Once you’re signed out, you’re all set and can sign back in when you want to chat or check your status updates again. Easy! Setting services to Manual
This one’s slightly more complicated, but a great way to continue messaging and reduce data use. What you’re about to do here is disable automatic syncing, which means that you can still use email, but without frequent push notifications sapping your data (and battery life).
For Email on S60 devices (i.e. Nokia N97), you’ll need to head into Settings, select your inbox and change Sync Frequency to Manual Sync only.
S40 devices (such as the Nokia C3-00) have slightly differenprocess settings. Open up your inbox, select Options, then More, then Settings, and set your Update my Inbox field to Manual.
Remember to run through this process for each inbox that you have running.
S40 users can also apply these changes to their social networking Communities app, by heading into their options and settings Minimize my data use to On. Roaming
When heading abroad, your Nokia device can roam and pick up foreign data connections. This can be costly for the user, especially if your email inbox is set to automatically sync. To reduce costs, you can either disable roaming, or simply set your services to manual.
This is something that’s presented differently depending on your device. For most devices you can alter your email’s roaming settings within the client’s options. For the new Nokia N8, however, you will need to head to your main menu’s connectivity settings and change your Data when abroad option to Always ask. Flight mode and standby
It’s a bit extreme, but if you want to reduce data completely when you’re not using your phone, you can always quickly select the Offline or Flight profiles on your device; think of it as putting your phone on standby. Disabling avatars
Also, for users of Chat, remember to uncheck the Enable avatars in Ovi option. This may mean that none of your friends have images next to their names, but it will also save the data that would have been spent on downloading these.
That’s it for now. I hope these tips serve you well and mean that you can continue to enjoy our messaging services without much of an extra data cost! Feel free to let us know if you have any further tips in the comments below…
Source : http://blog.ovi.com/2010/12/23/how-to-keep-your-me...