Slashdot Mirror
T-Mobile May Offer Free Gmail Data Access On G1 Phone
An anonymous reader writes "AndroidAuthority.com is reporting that T-Mobile is considering putting free ad-supported Gmail access on its T-Mobile G1 smartphone — no data plan required. The G1 launches in New York tomorrow and is the first device to hit the market that uses the Linux-based Android OS that is backed by Google."
According to Fortune, such a plan would not come without risks to T-Mobile. T-Mobile currently charges for data access, and data access fees have been becoming an increasingly large part of T-Mobileâ(TM)s quarterly revenues.
How much of the cut would they get for the advertising? I suspect that they might be better off overall by the attraction of providing a free service and also getting revenue to cover at least part of the costs.
Good luck competing against the iPhone though... the world is held in awe by Steve Job's line of shiny products, never mind the monopolistic policy of banning apps that "compete" with its own services.
You could use gmail as conduit for other data. e.g. email a URL to gmail, some server-side app checks the mail account, loads the page for you, and sends it back in a reply email. You could presumably also have an Android app that hides the mechanics of this to allow you to just load web pages or other data through gmail, free of charge
If they do offer this service, I see potential for a much-improved version of my great experience with cheap mobile internet access seven years ago.
Back then, a lot of mobile phones didn't offer graphical web-browsing. My phone at the time (some Samsung of some form) was purely text-based, but Telus (in Canada) offered a $2/month unlimited email option.
So, I signed up, and after the novelty of being able to check my email anywhere wore off, I began itching for more information.
Since Telus would still charge me 50 cents for Canada411 lookups, the first thing I did was write an email gateway for canada411.com (which was probably still canada411.sympatico.ca at the time). I had email to my domain set up to go to my home computer, and directed all email to services@mydomain directed through qmail to go to a Perl script.
If the subject was "Canada411" (since Telus allowed me to store various preset subject lines), it would then parse the body as lookup parameters (Last name, First name, City, if I recall correctly). Then it would email me the results in plain text, after doing some web-scraping.
Later on, I added some more "services", like dictionary lookups, recipes, university course schedules, etc. I could even list the current Slashdot headlines if I wanted (in retrospect, since RSS was already around, a basic email-based RSS reader would probably have been more generally-applicable).
Nowadays, with HTML email being the norm for smartphones, you wouldn't even necessarily need to do the web-scraping (which is what ate up most of my development time).
With email-based web-browsing, you can get what you want, but it takes a certain amount of patience and ingenuity.
Your email message should look like this:
TO: www4mail@kabissa.org
CC:
BCC:
SUBJECT:
GET http://ictupdate.cta.int/
Simply replace http://ictupdate.cta.int/ with the address of the web page you want to read.
Web-to-email servers
The email addresses of the most popular web-to-email servers are listed below.
www4mail@kabissa.org
www4mail@access.bellanet.org
www4mail@wm.ictp.trieste.it
www4mail@unganisha.idrc.ca
text@PageGetter.com
page@grabpage.org
www@web2mail.com
Did anyone here read the CNN/FORTUNE article that the Android Authority article referred to?
Where in the original article does it actually mention T-mobile/Google will be using ads?
The author of the Fortune article states:
Should T-Mobile decide to offer free Gmail access, it would be seen as a big counter move to Research in Motionâ(TM)s (RIMM) BlackBerry e-mail service, which costs $15 a month extra. And if telcos embrace Googleâ(TM)s ad-supported free e-mail, it could help drive Googleâ(TM)s ultimate aim to spread its successful desktop advertising business to mobile phones.
He said if not when. And while Gmail may be ad-supported, their current lineup of mobile based email clients are not. At least I've never seen an ad on my gmail java-based client on my phone. Or any other google mobile product (gmaps, gmail, etc).
Is t-mobile going to ask Google to develop a T-mobile specific client (with a hardcoded encrypted access point) that purposely injects ads? If so, it's nothing that's ever been confirmed by t-mobile, or google. Just the thoughts of the author based on presumably how gmail works on the web.
Unless all you need to do is purchase a phone and call T-Mobile up to enable this feature it isn't free. It may be at no additional cost, but it isn't free.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Hey um, not to be too picky here, but do you think that when an article mentions something as relatively advanced as free data access on a mobile device (which also happens to be a phone), we could have a picture of something more modern than a 1982 suitcase phone, a rotary phone my grandma would've laughed at and what looks to be some kind of 1970s pacman pocket game?
Just a thought.
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
For me, this would be more useful if it used https to gmail. The article, of course, is just one step shy of speculation (and why not link to the original blog post with more information?).
T-Mobile is in a decent position with the next gen of smart phones. I've seen their "hotspots" more commonly than other carriers. Combine a wireless plan with their hotspot plan (which appears to be a little pricey at $20/mo with phone service) and you've got cell coverage most places and 802.11 coverage many places.
Still, I'm not likely to get a data plan myself. A nice (open) phone that can use 802.11 and get email for "free" sounds pretty good to me.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
Considering the fact that GMail is my primary email that is actually very good news...this is becoming more and more appealing to me.
No, anybody who thinks it's useless hasn't thought it through. I used to get free email access on my phone. So what did I do? Wrote up a script which sends me an email with each Slashdot story's summary. Not incredibly useful, but I find myself with 10 minutes every day (usually commuting) where it's just me and my phone, so I read them. Then when I get home, I can check the comments if I want. Also, if this service allows attachments - couldn't you download MP3s on the phone just by emailing them to yourself? Sounds good to me.
FWIW, with T-Mobile's data plans it's an "all or nothing" thing. If you haven't paid for unblocked data, you'll not get it. Unlike certain telcos, T-Mobile USA never chargers per-kilobyte.
Right now, the data plans are:
There's also a dedicated data plan (ie no voice plan needed), and a Sidekick pre-paid plan.
So, in short, if you haven't paid for "app background data", you're not going to get it.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.