Power Tips for your Cellphone

If you have a GPRS and Bluetooth-enabled cellphone then you can do a lot of things with it other than just make calls and send SMSs. In the article, we will talk about two different usages of such a phone, one is synchronizing the cellphone and the PC so that you can remote control some of the PC's applications from the phone. These can be such as using the phone to control the volume of your PC, navigate the mouse curser or control a PowerPoint presentation. On the other hand, you can make calls from your PC and even type SMSs with the ease of a keyboard and send them over Bluetooth. You can even take backups of you phone data to your PC. To do these, you need software such as FMA (FloAt's Mobile Agent). The software is available for Sony Ericsson models and those using other phone models can do a Google search.

The other thing that we will talk about in this article is using any standard WAP/GPRS-enabled phone to read your local mail from your office PC, access files and even run commands on it through the phone and get the output back, no matter where your are. You just need to have GPRS connectivity in that area.

Controlling PowerPoint



To remotely control PowerPoint presentations you will need: a Sony Ericsson phone, a Bluetooth dongle for your PC/notebook (if you don't have a Bluetooth-enabled PC) and FMA installed on your PC. (Win XP has enhanced its Bluetooth support with Service Pack 2, therefore, you don't need to install the drivers for the USB-Bluetooth dongle. XP automatically recognizes its presence and configures it for you.) 

First download the FMA software from www.fma.sourceforge. net and install it on your PC. Then set the connectivity options from the Tools>Options menu. Now to use your phone as a remote control, go to the Connectivity>Accessory option of the phone. Here you will find a new menu called FMA. Selecting it will open a list of Windows applications. Each of these applications has different options to remote control it. For example, if you want to remote control a PowerPoint presentation, select the PowerPoint menu. Here you will see four new menus (Start Show, Next Slide, Prev Slide and End Show), which means you can perform all these actions from your phone. You can even control your mouse from here (Mouse Control menu).

Here you can set the connectivity options for FMA

Besides Bluetooth, the software can work over IR or even a data cable. Since it doesn't depend upon line of sight like IR, Bluetooth works the best for it. Moreover, you can use the Bluetooth proximity option to automatically logoff your PC, when your mobile phone is out of the Bluetooth range.

Remote control your PC



This function could be useful for power users or network administrators who want to control their PCs remotely using their cellphone. This is done using the WAP browser on your GPRS phone, and you can check your mail, access files and even run some commands from it. The DataLocker Desktop Agent software (download from www.mydatalocker.com) converts your PC into a WAP server. The basic functionality of the software, called Basic Plan, is free and has a session limitation of 5 minutes. After downloading and installing the software, you have to first create a new login at the datalocker's website. Do this and get yourself a username and password. Now start the software, which will ask you for the username and password that you registered with. Then go to the service tab and click on the Start button to start the WAP server on your machine.

To access this machine from your phone, just open the WAP browser on it and enter the URL www.mydatalocker. com/mobile.aspx. It will open a page that asks you for the same username and password. Provide these to login. You'll get four links, namely 'My documents', 'My Mail', 'Command Prompt' and 'Flight Info'. Select the first one to see all documents in the corresponding folder on your machine. Use the second option to read MS Outlook mails, and the third option will open a new page where you can type any Windows command that will be executed on your machine and

the output sent to your mobile phone. 

Here you can set the connectivity options for FMA The main window of FMA, gives you all the vital data about your cellphone, including battery life, temperature and signal strength

Datalocker is a very beneficial tool. If you have a dial-up DSL connection at home, then it will give a dynamic IP address to your machine every time you connect. So when you are away from home and want to connect to your home PC, using WinXP Remote Desktop Sharing, then you can use datalocker to determine the dynamically assigned IP. For this, you can your phone to connect to datalocker and run the 'ipconfig' command, which will give you your machine's IP. This way, you can remotely access your desktop.

Anindya Roy