h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Thanks
...And is it worth it? (he said, expecting a definitive yes)

Having played around with the Ericsson R380 emulator, I'd probably wait for that one - it's just so much cooler (it has a PEN!!).

However, Ericsson are showing signs that they're not actually going to release the real thing until GPRS networks are up and running (probably late this year), so you might want to go for the Nokia in the meantime...

Is it worth it?
Hmmm. Tough one. If email is a major communication tool for you then the ability to access it from your phone is cool. Access to fun places like h2g2 is nice. Access to all the other information you can get might be useful one day? If your a technophile and/or love to pose in the pub by getting up to the minute footie news etc feed into your phone then it's worth thousands.
But really at the moment its little more than a toy, in the future when on-line banking etc are working then it will gain use.
So if you can afford it and want it bad enough £120's not too bad. Although as Adam says there will be plenty more phones coming out so waitings not a bad option (A skill I lack). But if you want the phone from The Matrix, or like me think the 7110 is a nice design, (You'll loose the pen Adam), then go for it. Incedently you can keep costs down by joining BTInternet's £9.99 a month plan for free evening and weekend internet access, (useful for your PC too) so you dont have to worry about call charges and they have a WAP version of Excite as a home page. (Never thought I'd give BT a plug)

Just got hold of a Nokia 7110e (On Orange) and I can't manage to access wap.h2g2.com. Has anyone else experienced this? If so, please say so I know I'm not alone. Otherwise, could you explain how you do so I can tell if it's just me causing the problem.
BTW Deadlock, the Orange EveryDay 50 Package which gives you 50 free off-peak minutes a day is 50p a day so it costs £15/£15.50 a month, not £30.
And Peregrin, Yes, it is worth it - even without WAP it's a great phone. It's so lovely . I've had an unreasoned hatrid of Mobile Phones until this one came along. Can't wait to access h2g2...

Got it!

Ooops. Your right about the £15.
To get h2g2 on the 7110 you'll need to go through your standard ISP. None of the dedicated WAP portals are very good at it. Check out the forum on waph2g2 bug from the h2g2 on the move page.
Try these settings;
Homepage://wap.h2g2.com/
Conn. Type: Continuous
Conn. Secur: Off
Bearer : Data
Dial up no: (Your usual internet dial up number)
IP Address: 195.58.110.201 (this is some open access wap portal)
Auth Type: Normal
Data Call Type: Analogue (Although if ISDN is supported use that)
Data call speed: 9600
User name: ( your ISP user name )
Password:

I have to disagree with you there - I've been using Orange and Vodafone with no particular problems since January. Fonedata isn't very good - their dialup is usually good (they have a fast ISDN number to call) but their gateway doesn't seem to like long URLs.

One problem I have noticed with all connections is that sometimes the connection is dropped before you even get to a WAP page. You can tell when this happens because the little telephone in the top left hand corner disappears before the "Connecting to service" message goes from the screen.

This is entirely due to network problems (just like your modem disconnecting before you get a chance to log in) and I've seen it happen on most dialup settings. The only solution in this case is to try again, perhaps closer to a window (if you're inside).

Do you know how you fixed it?

Will h2g2 ever offer the ability to look at the forums on one's own page or search for any old forum via WAP?

As you typed I was finishing off that bit of the code

Forums are now available from each and every article. I haven't yet upgraded the search to look for Forums and non-Approved Entries - I'm now concentrating on making h2g2 On the Move accessible to all those people in US with Phone.com (i.e. non-WAP) browsers in their phones.

For the next week or two, I won't change the functionality of the site, but if you think of any features you think are missing please tell me and I'll work on them afterwards!

The ability to look at the latest forum postings on the forums you've been in is a good one - like the list provided on the html home pages. Another thing is it would be nice to be able to go enter http://wap.h2g2.com/A******/ to go to an entry - whether limited to approved or not. This would make offline reading work better I think. If only there was a way to browse manually through the cache...

Ooooh, that is very cool news! I already have a Qualcomm 2760 on the Sprint PCS network. This thing has the Phone.com browser in it if I understand correctly (known as Sprint PCS Wireless Web in this case). I saw some indication they were intending to move this system to WAP anyway, I thought, but it'll be interesting to see eventually one way or the other.

I've not tried the service of that so far because the offerings are rather limited and the time is expensive (and not included in the minimum charges I already pay phone-wise). Even so I'll be happy to guinea pig this a bit for you once you have something available to it. (Heck I'd love to test it a lot, but I can only do that if someone's going to cover the charges. )

wap.h2g2.com/A*** will come later - if you want to do something like that for the moment you'll have to enter an address like wap.h2g2.com/article.cgi?aID=A***

This won't display all entries, since entries that are written as HTML cannot be translated to WML and displayed on the phone. If you try and access one of these you'll simply be told that it's the wrong format.

That's great! Is there something similar to access any forum?

But you can get a browser called WapMan which will do it for you on a palm. Or get WinWap for a windows platform (kind of destroys the mobility of it, but, hey!)

Remember that you can examine the URL you are currently viewing simply by saving a bookmark to it...

You should be able to view any forum or post simply by changing the IDs in the URL

OK CrazyOne, if you fancy wasting your phone bill over the weekend go and be a guinea pig at http://wapdev.h2g2.com/

With any luck, it should work on your Sprint PCS phone as well as any WAP phone. Unfortunately, I can't check that out right now 'cos Sprint doesn't run its service in Europe - any bug reports you can get to me will be really useful!

Thanks,

Adam

I dont know if you are still interested or if you have sorted the WAP headache out yet, but I can tell you that Siemens have now released the C35i, with phone.com software in the UK. They are a good phone with plenty of extra's. The screen is a bit on the small side but you can use all of it by pressing the # key to get rid of the arrows and stuff.

Sorry if forgot to add that you can get a look at the WAP phones on HTTP://WWW.carphonewarehouse.com.

You don't /actually/ need a WAP server. I have a test page running on: http://www.y-a.ch/wap that's just plain WML, served off an Apache web server.

The WAP service you connect to actually connects you to a WAP Gateway, which handles the transfer. So you can actually host a WAP site on a regular Web server (once you've configured it for the right MIME types and so on).