Mobile Apptitude

The LG Rumor is one of the most popular messaging phones on the market today.  It’s slide out qwerty keyboard revolutionized texting from a feature phone and made it an iconic device for those who want easy messaging capabilities without the complexity of smarphones.  Even with all of it’s features, it lacks an email client for reading and composing emails right from the device.  Sure, you can check web mail like gmail or yahoo using the web browser but the experience just isn’t the same.

Fret no longer.  I recently discovered a fully functional email client for the Rumor from Seven.  Seven provides mobile email and messaging solutions for non-smartphones and has partnered with many major wireless carriers and handset manufacturers including Sprint.  They currently have a beta program that allows anybody to try out their email client for free.

This email client is one of the best I’ve seen.

• You can set it up to check multiple email addresses.  You can easily setup personal email for gmail, yahoo, msn, and AOL.  It can even support your work email if your work email supports outlook webmail.
• It syncs to your calendar.  Whether it’s google calendar or your microsoft exchange calendar, your appointments and meetings are visible in the calendar tab. You can even view attendees of your meeting.
• It allows you to search contacts.  It will pull up contacts from all email accounts setup in the client and let you view the details of  you contact including phone numbers and alternate email addresses.
• It has preset responses if you want to just send a quick message like “call me on my mobile phone”
• You can have it beep or vibrate to notify you when you recieve emails. Of course, you have to have the application open and running for the notification to work.  The Calendar notification will work even when the application is not open.
• It even allows  you to set a password lock so other people can’t access your emails.
• and it’s free! (for now at least)

To try the application out on your LG Rumor:

1. Send a text message with the download link to your phone by going here and entering your phone number.
2. When you recieve the text message, click on the download link by selecting “options” -> “go”.  This should launch the browser and take you to the Seven download site.
3. Choose “other” in the Vendor choice drop down box.
4. Choose “J2ME” in the Model choice drop down box.
5. Selecting OK will automatically start the download process.
6. The email client  named “SEVEN” gets saved to your Application folder.  Go to “Menu” -> “MyContent” -> “Applications” to launch the application and go through setup.

If you plan to use this application, you might want to add an unlimited data plan.  All those emails can add up to a lot of data usage.

It’s not going to turn your Rumor into a BlackBerry Curve – but it does make your Rumor a lot more savvy.