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By Rob, February 16, 2009 9:24 AM

Finally, Microsoft have opened up free POP access to Hotmail users. No 3rd party tools required. It’s come too late for me, as the lack of POP access (free or paid) to my Hotmail account forced me over to GMail some time ago, and I’ve never looked back. However, my Hotmail account is still active, so I gave it a try out of curiosity.

Adding your account on the iPhone is simple enough – Just go into your email settings, add a new account of type ‘other’, fill in your credentials and the POP server settings will be configured automatically.

Maybe I’ve just become used to GMail’s IMAP access, but the Hotmail offering, whilst welcome, is a bit lacking. For example, you only get your main Inbox, so any folders you have set up are inaccessible. Also, it’s painfully slow, even over O2′s 3G. I haven’t tried it on WiFi yet so your mileage may vary.

Of course, this should work with any POP client, and the lack of folder support may be an iPhone limitation. However, I’ve not experienced this before with other POP accounts. I’ll be checking it later on my desktop client to see how it fares there.

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By Rob, February 4, 2009 5:49 PM

I’m on my second iPhone (contract) on the O2 network, and I’ve always noticed that the image quality when browsing sites over the cellular network has been quite shocking. Most of the time, this isn’t too much of an issue, and I’ve just become used to it. I appreciate that O2 would rather me use as little data as possible, and their on-the-fly image compression is their answer to that. However, sometimes, I really want to see images how they were meant to be seen. After all, I’ve invested in a pretty expensive phone with one of the best screens on the market.

So, I was pretty pleased to find (thanks to someone on twitter – I forget their name, sorry!) a way around this. In the iPhone settings app, select ‘General’ -> ‘Network’ -> ‘Cellular Data Network’, and change the Username from ‘vertigo’ to ‘bypass’. Suddenly everything becomes much clearer. Not the best examples, but here’s an original:

BBC Weather Image (Before)

…..Now without the compression:

BBC Weather Image (After)

EDIT 17/05/2009: I’ve been reading reports over the last few days that this doesnt work anymore. Leave me a comment if this is or isn’t working for you.

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By Rob, February 3, 2009 2:02 PM

Lucky lucky Stanford students.

http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs193p/cgi-bin/index.php