I bought a Motorola Razr V3x some 3 weeks ago. I downloaded and installed the standalone GMail app on it and after 3 weeks of trying, I finally got it working. I am using the Smart Prepaid mobile phone service for this phone. Before I got it working properly I keep getting the “needs data connection” error whenever GMail app tries to login. I figured it was because I needed EDGE and it was not available in my area and I can only get GPRS. But GPRS should be enough to provide me with a data connection that the GMail app was asking for.

I downloaded settings for my SIM by following the instructions found here. It may take a while to receive those settings, in my case it took about two hours before I received the settings. When you do receive the settings OTA, you should be able to see SmartGPRS and SmartInternet with a little lock icon next to it in your WebAccess/Web Sessions. By default you will be connecting using SmartGPRS, but change the default connection to SmartInternet. This should allow GMail app and a host of other Java apps like Mobispine to work properly.

I have been playing around with Xen for the past week and it’s always interesting to see Free Software/Open Source alternatives to products like VMWare or Virtual PC. So far I have been able to install Edgy as an domU inside a Feisty dom0 on a file-based disk image. It’s unnecessarily complicated to setup initially but once you get into it, it’s pretty simple. Unfortunately, I don’t have the hardware needed to run Xen in full virtualization mode. Full virtualization allows the guest OS to run unmodified and requires processor support, which means either IVT (aka Vanderpool) or AMD-V (aka Pacifica) extensions. Right now I’m happy with paravirtualization mode since it’s all I need to be able to perform fault isolation experiments.