I've finally had time to sit down and do some research on syncml push notification. Basically what I've done is made a perl script that kicks in when funambols log is changed. It then checks if the log any changes have occurred what device initiated the changes. If it decides that these are changes that the my cell phone needs to know about, it sends a push message to my phone telling it to update, and my phone automatically updates. It also sends different messages depending upon what needs to be updated; calendar, contacts or both.

As you might have noticed there hasn't been very much activity on gsmblog lately. This is due to the fact that I have been busy getting the new version of gsmstuff.net running, and also been traveling a bit lately. But updates should be more regular from now on.

Anyhow, I wanted to try out the early bird version of mShell for 3rd edition, and realized that I would have to sign the application myself to be able to install it. I realized that I actually never had done that before, and when trying to do it I realized it would be easier with a tutorial. Unfortunately all of the guides out there seemed to be rather lousy. Most of them step by step guides, with millions of pictures that just made things harder to understand. So I decided to make my own quick and dirty guide, for those of us who have used a computer before, and don't need a picture-by-picture tutorial. So here goes.

 Did you now that is possible to get totally free pushmail on your symbian phone? All you pay for is data traffic if you use via GPRS/UMTS. And if you have a good data traffic plan it would be totally free. The solution works really great via WLAN, and on most GPRS/UMTS networks. Some operators however automatically close idle connections, but often this can be avoided by forcing the access point (AP) to give you a public IP-address. The only thing you need to get this working is have access to an IMAP server that supports the IDLE command, or to be able to configure your own server. This howto has three parts: Installing your own server, setting up a phone to use IMAP IDLE and getting your AP to provide a public IP-address.

This is a quick and dirty guide how to install and configure your own funambol server (The example is on Debian linux, but procedure is similar for other linux distros. It is also possible to install funambol on windows, if you don't have a linux server to install it on)

The guide will also show you how to set up user accounts, and use them to synchronize contacts and calendars on your N80 and with outlook. The procedure is the same on all symbian 3rd edition phones. Any syncml compatible device should be able to do the same, but the procedure might differ. You can also sync other applications and devices (like pda's).