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To set up Bird News Anywhere, go to http://www.birdguides.com/anywhere/setup
 Using the service is similar to using a web page, in that you move between related pages of information by clicking on links. Because of the limitations of mobile phone handsets, Bird News Anywhere pages are shorter and less interactive than our Bird News Extra service. Like most mobile services, the Bird News Anywhere service is mainly text-based, though photographs are available for handsets able to display them. The information provided by Bird News Anywhere is updated frequently so the service allows you to access constantly updated news via your mobile phone. Bird News Anywhere pages are less restricted in length than SMS messages, so we are able to give you more information than we can squeeze into a short text message. What are the advantages of Bird News Anywhere? Bird News Anywhere gives you access to all the recent bird news that is on the BirdGuides website, even when you are in the field. At any time, wherever you are, you'll be able to use your mobile phone to look up all the recent sightings anywhere in the country. By clicking on any sighting you can get further information about the past history of that bird or further details of the site where it has been reported (usually including a grid reference, and often details of how to access it). The amount of information you can access is greater than anything a pager service can provide and, since you already have a mobile phone, this service costs less than one that involves having to rent or buy a pager. If your phone or PDA supports it, you can also view bird photographs via Bird News Anywhere. What are the disadvantages of Bird News Anywhere? At the moment we can think of only three limitations compared to other news services:
What can I get from Bird News Anywhere? Bird News Anywhere provides much the same information as our Bird News Extra service (excluding certain graphical pages, notably the BirdMap). Pages provide the following information:
A subscription to Bird News Anywhere costs £40 per year, or £5 per month, and short-term "Pay-As-You-Go" options are also available for occasional users. When you first register you will be entitled to a free 1-week trial period. In addition, you will also generally be charged by your mobile phone provider. This charge will be based either:
or:
Feedback from users on various tariffs suggests that most calls to Bird News Anywhere, however you pay, cost only a few pence. However, if you are concerned about charges, we recommend you consult your contract's Terms and Conditions or contact your service provider for advice on data tariffs. Many mobile phone users on monthly contracts will find that some or all calls to the service will come out of their "free call time" or "free downloads", so these calls are effectively free to these users. Can I try the service without paying? Yes. You can try Bird News Anywhere free of charge for one week (apart from the connection charges detailed above). Just go to the setup page and sign up. At the end of a week, your trial will end and no payment will be taken - if you try to access Bird News Anywhere after that you will be offered the option of a 15-minute or 24-hour "Pay-As-You-Go" connection, or you can elect to subscribe for a month or a year at that point. As I'm paying you a subscription, couldn't you make calls to the service free? Unfortunately not. We have no control over how much your network provider charges you for accessing WAP or websites from your phone, nor do we receive any of this income. How do I access Bird News Anywhere? You access Bird News Anywhere much as you would a website - via a bookmark. However there may be a few initial steps to go through, as follows:
Each step is explained in more detail below. Can I use Bird News Anywhere on my phone? To use the Bird News Anywhere service, your phone or PDA must be capable of accessing WAP or HTML pages. If you're not sure, consult your handset documentation or contact your mobile provider for details. If your phone has any of the following menu options:
then you can probably assume your phone is capable of accessing WAP or HTML pages, once enabled. Whether or not you can use Bird News Anywhere depends on your handset, not on how you pay for your mobile phone usage. Provided your handset supports WAP or XHTML/HTML there is no reason why Pay-As-You-Go phones should not be able to access the service. How do I set up WAP on my phone? If you have not accessed a WAP or website before, you may find you need to set up your phone before you can access the Bird News Anywhere service (though many phones are supplied pre-configured). If you're not sure, contact your mobile provider or handset manufacturer; the following websites may prove useful: My phone is enabled. How do I register for Bird News Anywhere? Just go to http://www.birdguides.com/anywhere/setup and follow the instructions. I've registered. How do I bookmark Bird News Anywhere? This section describes how to bookmark the BirdGuides Bird News Anywhere service on a range of phones. If your phone is not listed, you will need to consult your handset documentation or provider, but the examples given for other phones will give you an idea of the steps involved. You can have a bookmark sent to your phone (once only) from the setup page. You can then save this bookmark as follows: Nokia N78
Nokia 3501i
Not all handsets can deal with the "WAP Push" format that is used to send bookmarks. If your phone cannot handle a WAP Push, you may not receive the message, you may not be able to open it, or it may be garbled, and you will need to set up your bookmark manually, as exemplified in the following sections. Nokia N78
Nokia 3501i
Nokia 6630
NEC N343i (with thanks to the contributor)
Sagem myC2-3 (with thanks to the contributor)
Most handsets will allow you to define a 'home page' - set it to your preferred Bird News Anywhere page for the quickest possible access. With your help, we would like to expand this page to cover other handsets and manufacturers - if you have worked out how to bookmark and visit WAP sites using your mobile phone, please email details of the model and the process to . I've bookmarked Bird News Anywhere. How do I access the service? Again, this section describes how to access the BirdGuides Bird News Anywhere service from a bookmark on a Nokia 3510i handset. Other Nokia models will use a similar process. If you do not own a Nokia phone, or you find the process is different, you will need to consult your handset documentation or provider.
If you set Bird News Anywhere as your home page, the procedure is slightly simpler:
Does Bird News Anywhere require access to a computer? No. Although we anticipate most users will register online (and some personalisation features are only available via the Web), you can also subscribe by phone (during office hours) on 0800 919391. I will only use Bird News Anywhere occasionally so I don't want to pay a subscription - is there anything I can do? Yes. We offer "Pay-As-You-Go" connections whereby you can access the full Bird News Anywhere service for a limited period (15 minutes or 24 hours) without setting up a subscription - we charge you via your mobile phone bill. We currently charge £1 for 15 minutes' access, or £3 for 24 hours. To use the Pay-As-You-Go options:
Bird News Anywhere isn't working properly on my iPhone - what do I do? By default, Bird News Anywhere serves pages in WML (Wireless Markup Language) to devices that claim to support it - WML is a compact format specifically designed for mobile devices. The iPhone, however, appears to render WML oddly (without line breaks and without functioning links). If you encounter this problem, go to the setup page and change the Protocol (bottom right) to "HTML". Then refresh the page on your iPhone. The iPhone does not support "WAP Push", so it's not possible to store a bookmark that's texted to an iPhone. Please copy the bookmark and email it to yourself so that you can easily navigate to Bird News Anywhere (it will look like: news.birdguides.com/?w=xxxxxxxx). When you get there we suggest you create an icon for Bird News Anywhere. Simply tap the + icon at the bottom of the screen and choose Add to Home Screen. When I revisit a page it hasn't been updated - what's wrong? It's possible that there's nothing new to tell you. Assuming that's not the case, it's likely that your phone has 'cached' the page in question. Because of the relative slowness and cost of connecting via a mobile phone, handsets often 'cache' pages for a certain period - that is, store them locally so they can be retrieved without having to reconnect to the server. This is OK for static pages (such as the home page) but not for dynamic pages that change frequently. You can generally tell your phone to "Reload" an individual page, or "Clear the cache" to force every page to be reloaded. On the Nokia 3510i phone you reload a page by first navigating to the page in question, then selecting Options followed by Reload. To clear the cache entirely, select Options followed by Clear the cache. An obscure situation that will show similar symptoms arises if you click an "Earlier Reports" link to look at earlier reports, and THEN bookmark one of the resulting pages. The 'earlier reports' pages show sightings reported before a certain date and time (which is encoded in the bookmark), so if you access such a bookmark it will, by definition, never be updated with later reports. If you find yourself in this situation, delete the offending bookmark, navigate from the home page to the latest reports from the region, county or site you're interested in, and bookmark the first page you come to - this page will always show the most recent sightings. Do I always have to navigate from the home page to the page I want? No. You can bookmark any page (such as a particular county page, or one of your personal sites, or the history page for a bird you're intending to go and see), and then connect directly to that page via the bookmark you've created. To bookmark a page on the Nokia 3510i:
Pictures aren't displaying - what should I do? First of all, make sure you're waiting long enough - sometimes pictures take a while to download, and may not display until the file has completely finished downloading. If a picture doesn't appear on a picture page, try clicking the "Link to picture file" link. On some phones this will work even though the picture doesn't display on the actual picture page. If you can view most Bird News Anywhere pages, but not the photo page (as has been reported on, for example, the Sony Ericsson K700i and T610 models), try setting the Picture mode to "linked" (in "Your advanced settings" on the setup page). This means you won't actually see pictures on the picture pages, but a link to the picture file will appear. Some phones can't display pictures within a text page, but can display linked pictures files separately. If none of the above suggestions solves the problem, it's possible that your handset simply can't display the picture - some phones (particularly older WAP phones) cannot render pictures in the format we use (JPG). Do I have to stay connected while I read the information? Not necessarily. Many phones will allow you to disconnect (using the red button) without clearing the page you're currently viewing. Some phones will cache a whole series of previously visited pages, so you can browse backwards and forwards through pages you've already viewed, without reconnecting. Also, you may be able to save individual pages - though if you save a dynamic page and view the saved version, bear in mind that it won't show any new information added after you saved the page. When I access Bird News Anywhere I see a message "You have not supplied a Bird News Anywhere ID" or "Page Not Found" or similar - what am I doing wrong? This message usually indicates an error in the address you've bookmarked on your phone. Check your bookmark carefully; the address should be something like this: news.birdguides.com/?w=xxxxxxxx where xxxxxxxx is your unique ID as shown on the setup page. Make sure you've got every character right, including all the slashes, question marks etc. If you're sure you've got the address right, you could try this longer version: http://news.birdguides.com/default.asp?w=xxxxxxxx where xxxxxxxx is your unique ID as before. When I access Bird News Anywhere I see a message "413 Requested Entity Too Large" (or similar) - what am I doing wrong? This error indicates that a Bird News Anywhere page is too large for your phone to download. You can reduce the size of the pages via the setup page (see "Your advanced settings"). I asked for a bookmark to be sent to my phone but it never arrived - what should I do now? There are three likely reasons for this:
Assuming your phone is capable of using WAP or HTML, you should still be able to create your bookmark manually. My phone/PDA can view HTML, but not WAP - what should I do? The Bird News Anywhere service, by default, automatically detects what kind of browser you are using, and delivers the pages in the format required. However you can override this "auto-detect" facility from the setup page to force the service to supply XHTML, HTML or WML (WAP) - see "Protocol" in "Your advanced settings". When I access Bird News Anywhere, I see a message saying I've previously used the service on a different handset - what should I do? If you change your handset, or your provider updates your mobile browser (which may happen automatically), you may see this message. Reset your account via the setup page - click the link under "Your mobile number" in the "Your Bird News Anywhere Settings" section. You can use this even if you haven't changed your mobile number. If you have changed your number, you'll need to confirm the new number (follow the instructions) but either way you should subsequently be able to access the service as before. Is there anything I can do to reduce the amount of scrolling I have to do? Yes. Bird News Anywhere offers a "compact" mode, intended for handsets with small screens, where blank lines and non-critical information such as headings are suppressed. Click the "Compact mode" link at the bottom of the Bird News Anywhere home page (also available in "Your advanced settings" on the setup page). I've changed my mobile or mobile number - what do I have to do? Go to the registration page.
Click here for information on setting up a new bookmark. To set up Bird News Anywhere, go to http://www.birdguides.com/anywhere/setup More information
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