TMobile, a T610, GPRS, and MacOS

Getting on-line with MacOS, TMobile, and a Sony Ericsson T610

We recently switched to TMobile for cellular phone service and wanted to get the most out of my wife's iBook and mac.com account. Specifically we wanted to be able to sync the Address Book and iCal info with the phone, use the phone to browse mac.com email, and use the phone as a GPRS modem so my wife could get her iBook on-line over the phone's data service. Here are some notes for those interested in doing the same.

Step 1, Getting the Phone

The first step was selecting a cellular provider and a phone. As you've no doubt gathered by the title of this page, we chose TMobile as the provider and the Sony Ericsson T610 as the phone. This decision was mainly based on cost.
Of the cellular carriers I considered, TMobile has by far the lowest prices and most reasonable terms for GPRS service. An unlimited use Internet service can be added to any TMobile phone plan for $20/month. There are no usage caps and GPRS connection time does not count against your cellular (voice) minutes. TMobile also offers cheaper Internet plans ("tzones") but those have data caps.
Once I had determined which carrier, the next step was choosing a phone. The lowest cost phone with built-in bluetooth and iSync support offered by TMobile was the T610. As it turns out, it was also the phone my wife preferred when we looked at them, so it was an easy choice. TMobile uses removable SIM cards to store account info, so if we need to switch to a different phone in the future, it will be relatively easy to do so.

Step 2, Setting up the Phone

After the phone was activated and we had verified that voice calls and the built-in "t-zones" Internet access was working, we started configuring things for iBook and mac.com access.
The first step was to add the GPRS data communication settings. General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) is a service that allows data to be transferred across the GSM cellular network. TMobile's "t-zones" uses GPRS, but there is separate server for Internet traffic that does less port blocking than the "t-zones" server. To setup the unlimited internet data connection I did the following on the T610:

Select Connectivity from the main menu
Select Data Comm
Select Data Accounts
Add a New Account
Gave it some obvious name (T-Mobile GPRS)
Set the APN to internet2.voicestream.com
Made a note of the CID number assigned to this account for later use.

I also set up the phone to access my wife's mac.com email account directly. This allows her to check email using the phone's built-in email client. To set up access to mac.com email on the T610:

Select Messaging from the main menu
Select Email
Select Options
Select Edit Account
Select New Account

Set the Connect Using to the datacomm account set up above
Set the protocol to IMAP4
Set the incoming server to mail.mac.com
Set the mailbox to your mac.com user name
Set the outgoing server to smtp.mac.com
Set the email address to your full mac.com return address
Set download to headers only
set the from name to your name

Go back to Email Options and select the account you just created
Once the above had been done, we could now browse my wife's mac.com email from the phone and send outgoing letters. [Note: we have had a few issues with the phone's outgoing email -- on occasion it rejects email addresses for unknown reasons. On the good side you can always send email using an SMS message rather than an email. On the bad side, SMS does not fall under the "all you can eat" unlimited internet plan, so using SMS messages costs $0.05 each.]
You can also send email directly to the phone as an SMS message by sending the email to xxxxxxxxxx@tmomail.net where the xxxxxxxxxx is replaced by the 10-digit phone number of the mobile phone. But again, such messages are charged at the SMS rate.

Step 3, Setting up MacOS

The final step was to get the phone setup for access from MacOS over bluetooth. This allows both iSync updating between the phone and AdressBook and iCal, and "GPRS tethering" where the Mac can connect to the Internet using the phone's GPRS service.
The first step is turning on the phone's bluetooth transceiver:

Select Connectivity from the main menu
Select Bluetooth
Turn On bluetooth
Optionally, go to Options and set the phone's name
Once the phone's bluetooth was turned on, we could "pair" the phone with the Mac by doing the following on the Mac:

On the mac, open the bluetooth setup from System Preferences then click on the devices tab and use Set Up New Device to add the T610. Once this is done, you should be able to use iSync to move data between the Address Book, iCal, and the phone.
Open the Network panel from System Preferences, select edit locations from the location pop-up, and add a new "location" that will correspond to using the T610:

Leave the TCP/IP set to Using PPP
in PPP set the telephone number to *99***X# where the X should be replaced by the one-digit CID number you noted above. [So if your gprs datacomm is stored in CID=2, the number would be *99***2#.]
Leave the account name and password blank
The PPP Options should include "use TCP header compression" but not "PPP echo packets". The other options can be set as you see fit.
In the Bluetooth modem tab, the modem should be set to "Ericsson Infrared" even though you will use bluetooth, not infrared. You should also enable error correction and compression as well as wait for dialtone and show modem status in menu bar.

Step 4, Going On-line via GPRS

Once all the above has been setup you should be able to connect to the internet on the Mac by using your phone. To go online:

Make sure the phone is within 20 feet of the Mac and that bluetooth is switched on.
On the mac, use the Location submenu in the Apple menu to switch to the location you setup above.
The go to the modem icon in the menu bar, check the bluetooth option and select connect. In a few seconds you'll be on-line using GPRS.
The phone will remain active, so you can still receive voice calls while online.

That's it. Overall we've been happy with the phone, and have no major complaints about it or TMobile. The only minor nits are occasional phone crashes which require removing of the batteries in order to reset the phone. Turning off the phone while it is charging seems to prevent the crashes. We've also found TMobile's coverage to be much better than Sprint's but that might not be true elsewhere.

Dale (dsouth "at" llnl "dot" gov)