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Hack 87 IRC from Your Mobile Phone
Get out from behind the desk, and IRC from your
mobile phone. Everywhere you go, you can take the channels with
you.
Why restrict yourself to being able to IRC
only from your PC or laptop? If you've got a smart
mobile phone, you can IRC from pretty much anywhere you can get a
signal. Here are a few tips on how to use IRC with a
Symbian- or J2ME-equipped
mobile phone.
At the top of the evolutionary tree for mobile phones right now are
those with the Symbian operating system. This includes the
SonyEricsson P800 and P900; the Nokia 7700, 6600, 3650, and N-Gage;
and a handful of more eclectic phones shipped by another four or five
phone manufacturers. Symbian phones that are currently shipping can
be split into two families: Series 60 (6600, 3650, N-Gage) and UIQ
(P800, P900); apps written for one family of devices will usually not
run on the other.
Series 60 has a number of IRC apps, my favorite being
WirelessIRC
(http://mobileways.de/M/1/4/0),
which has almost all the capabilities of a desktop IRC client:
private messages, multiple channels, DCC, and so forth. UIQ users
also have many choices, with SymIRC being one of the more popular
options (http://sulaco.mureakuha.com/symirc). This
application also has the advantage of being licensed under the free
GNU General Public
License (GPL), meaning that if you've got the
programming skills, you can take the existing source code and add
extra features and functionality.
IRC on a Symbian phone can be a great experience; you can still use
the phone as usual for voice calls, SMS, calendar lookup, address
book checking, playing games, listening to the radio or MP3s, and so
on. It's a multitasking networked computer, so IRC
is just another application within it.
If you haven't got a Symbian phone,
there's still hope if your phone can run
Sun's Java applications. The bare-bones but powerful
Virca (GPL-licensed) J2ME app offers good functionality (http://www.vidarholen.net/contents/virca).
The one fly in the Java soup is that many phones have poor
compatibility with the J2ME specifications, and the sockets-based
networking functions are often broken; the popular Nokia 3650 and
SonyEricsson T610 are just two phones in this category. Phones like
these won't run applications like Virca, but can
generally run HTTP-based IRC applications like
WLIrc (http://wirelessirc.sourceforge.net), which is
also licensed under the GPL. These rely on connecting via an external
HTTP gateway running elsewhere for connectivity to an IRC server.
Of course, to get one of these applications working, you need
connectivity. On a GSM network, GPRS is generally the best option.
With GPRS, most operators charge a traffic-based rather than
time-based fee for usage, and a slow-paced hour of IRC will often use
only 30-40 KB; with U.K. pricing around £2 per MB, this
can be cheaper than a single SMS and certainly cheaper than an
hour-long voice call. If you have an unlimited GPRS usage tariff as
offered by some of the U.S. operators, mobile IRC looks even more
attractive. A word of warning thoughsome operators charge a
flat fee for any GPRS connection, and the default GPRS pricing on
some networks can be very high, so make sure you understand your
tariff before running up huge bills! Many of the IRC clients display
a traffic counter so that you can keep track of your usage.
Jim Hughes
