Horas and konnichiwa untuk semua

I just spent more than two weeks in Indonesia, doing some work, and leaving lots of work back in Japan. I needed connectivity on the move, so I started to find a way to do like I usually do in Japan: use cellular phone to receive and send mails, and to log into Yahoo! Messenger for chat.

Since GSM is unheard in Japan, where no GSM carriers operate, I didn’t know much about how to do the above. I only heard that in the GSM world there is this GPRS thing that would allow GSM phones to go past the 9.6Kbps barrier. Another keyword is WAP. So I started asking people around but nobody could give me any clear information. It seems that in Indonesia most people found SMS is enough. SMS is quite useless for me. I did some learning on GSM things, got a GPRS/WAP capable phone (Nokia 3100). I found that there is no way to use WAP on Satelindo Mentari card. So I bought a proXL card, then set up the phone, and voila, I could got the WAP/GPRS working.

But funny thing is, many pages I usually accessed in Japan were inaccessible. Even wap.yahoo.com was inaccessible, while wap.yahoo.co.uk was accessible. Very funny. I got WAP/GPRS working but still could not login into Yahoo! Messenger, and reading/writing mails through wap.yahoo.co.uk is pain in the ass. I found that accessing WAP/GPRS makes the phone bill soars. It’s slow and expensive in Indonesia. I soon stopped hopelessly.

I kept wondering why GSM kept trying on improving SMS with MMS or EMS or wathever, instead of just adopting internet standard e-mail like cellular phones in Japan. I found MMS/EMS useless. BTW, I heard Mentari has SMS to e-mail gateway. I didn’t try, I only found out that proXL did not provide such gateway so I gave up.