Email notification by VoIP. Was: Re: Om2008.8: execute script on incoming call

[Ole Kliemann]

On Tue, Sep 02, 2008 at 07:49:25AM +0100, Stroller wrote:
> An application should be able to wake up the phone from suspend (or  
> rather add an entry to the `at` queue saying "wake me at this time") and 
> it should be able to fire up a GPRS connection. How long will it take to 
> check for new mail? 15 seconds? In that case you're effectively going to 
> lose 15 seconds of battery talktime for every check. If you check every 5 
> minutes then for every hour suspended you'll use additional battery at a 
> rate equivalent to 3 minutes of talktime. Checking every 5 minutes means 
> that you get a message on average within 2.5 minutes of it hitting your 
> mailbox; checking every 15 minutes means that you get a message on 
> average 7.5 minutes after it hits your mailbox, which is probably a 
> better battery compromise.
>
> The N95 manages this, why shouldn't the Freerunner? I did ask in one of 
> my previous posts whether the Openmoko work on dbus will accommodate  a 
> program sleeping (suspending?) the phone &/or initialising a GPRS 
> connection, but I got no reply (because I waffled too much in that post, 
> apparently). Some kind of standard method is surely needed, because I 
> could see it being quite complicated (and quite Freerunner-specific) to 
> do this stuff otherwise.

Yes, but when talking about elegance, I don't claim drop-calls to be
elegant. But imagine the FR's plop sound when it wakes up every 5
minutes in your pocket.

The costs of interval checking maybe not very high and the battery loss
irrelevant. Just elegant it is neither.

>> If you use notification by drop-call, the FR can sleep through - the
>> modem handles the wakeup.
>
> I'll be honest, I just don't personally like drop-calling. I dislike it 
> when a girl does it to you because she's too tight to buy minutes  
> (irrespective of the number she's wasted already this month and because 
> she knows a guy will always return a pretty girl's call) and I find it a 
> little inelegant for this application.

Okay, i can understand that. But be assured, I will only drop-call
myself. ;-)

> Another poster mentioned that some cell companies may block the number of 
> frequent drop-callers. Presumably it costs one of the call-providers 
> money to initiate a call which you are not then billed for? So it does 
> seem to be slightly naughty, too.

Yes, slightly. 

> You're right, though - ideally this should be handled by the phone's  
> modem (or by the phone's phone (??)) hardware, because that's already  
> handling incoming radio and sleep / wake-up. If only there were a way to 
> send a text message to a phone freely over the internet - we could use 
> that far more effectively for "pushing" our mail (or anything else). The 
> money mobile phone companies make from SMS messages, however, I suspect 
> this is a forlorn hope.

So I'm gonna annoy them with my drop-calls until they give us free text
messages over internet.

Still maybe one could ask on the HW list what the capabilities of the
modem are in regard to GPRS connections when the FR is suspended...

That would be an elegant solution: FR sleeps, modem handles GPRS traffic
from IMAP-idle server until he signals new mail.

Ole
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