Our user observation was conducted using a Nokia 6200 that was provided courtesy of C&WJ. Some reference maybe made to the specific features of the Nokia 6200 in the following article but is not to be taken as an evaluation of the phone itself. The testing areas were in the Montego Bay, St James area which covered: Freeport, Ironshore, Westgate, Bogue, Glendevon, Salt Spring, Cornwall Courts and the Montego Bay city center.

CWJ is using tri-band signaling with E-GSM (EDGE GSM) for their network that can accommodate handsets up to GSM 1900Mhz signaling.

Customer Service Setup
Unfortunately, we were not able to evaluate the dealer-customer experience when purchasing the service that would have been an interesting review by itself. So we did the next best thing, we did the setup through the C&WJ Customer service center by calling their 1-888-CALLCWJ, from your mobile dial 100.

Setting up
Three basic items we wanted to setup and confirm that the service was available and they are – Voicemail, Text messaging/Mobile Email and Wireless Web using GPRS (General Packet Radio Service).

After getting the Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system and listening to the prompts carefully we selected the mobile services option. However, we were a bit confused which option to choose whether GSM offerings or Product and services, so we selected “0” for an agent.

Charmaine, the customer service agent was very pleasant and seemed quite patient. Charmaine’s patience would be tested for the next 30 minutes or so that was spent on the phone getting our service setup.

VoiceMail
Firstly, Voice mail. It seems that we started getting calls already and a message was waiting to be retrieved. Trying to retrieve the message by dialing “123” we realized we didn’t have a passcode when we were prompted to provide one by the lovely voice of Paula-Ann Porter (FAME). Charmaine was kind enough to walk through the process of setting up our voice mail and provided us with the default passcode. Also she provided some tips on setting up a new pass code and a new personalized greeting. By default all calls missed are routed to the voice mail system unless you disable it.

Text Messaging
One of the things I have been using a lot of these days is text messaging. Charmaine guided us on sending text messages to other C&WJ GSM customers by prefixing the 7-digit mobile number with 876 and this goes for both prepaid and postpaid GSM Mobile customers. What if we wanted to email a TDMA mobile user? Well you would prefix 876 for postpaid customers and 338 for prepaid mobile customers according to Charmaine

Mobile Email
Another variation of text messaging is mobile to email messaging. This can be very useful if you want to send or receive short email messages over the Internet directly to a mobile user. Not much information was obtained on this feature; however, we did find on our own experimentation that the service was active. Most GSM phones especially the newer Nokia GSM phones had an email template option that prompts for the email address and the subject line before allowing you to type your message. At the end of composing your new message the sending number for email messages to be used was “555”. To receive email messages on your mobile phone, the sender simply send the short message to , where your mobile number should prefix with 876.

GPRS
General Packet Radio Service is really the gateway to the Internet from your cellular phone or from your laptop. GPRS can be used to facilitate other types of commercial applications that make use of the connection to the Internet through the cellular network. One of the things you need to be aware of is that depending on the screen size of your phone it maybe difficult to view the normal screen size you are accustomed to viewing a web page. Again we walked through the setup of the GPRS system on our handheld with Charmaine.