TUTORIAL. Get the most out of Mobile Documents on your Nokia Symbian^3 smartphone. Have up to four email widgets on each home screen.

(For 0.9.19 and later builds, check “About” in the options menu. Phones supporting this at date of publishing are: Nokia N8, C7, E7 & C6-01 (but notice, not C6-00). Home screen widgets will soon also be made availble on some Symbian S60 5th Edt smartphones, such as the Nokia N97 & N97 mini.)

Mobile Documents is activley being developed, and we believe that apps should not need manuals. But sometimes certain features may yet be hard to find or understand. This is our first walkthrough tutorial. If you like it and want us to publish more tutorials on other topics, please let us know. Leave a comment or send an email to support@mobiledocuments.com. Enough, here’s how to set up a Mobile Documents home screen widget through Nokia’s native email widget framework, step-by-step:

1. Install Mobile Documents (0.9.19)

For the moment you can only download Mobile Documents 0.9.19 from Nokia Beta Labs (you will need to become a member first too, but it’s easy). Install Mobile Documents and add all your email accounts. The result might look like the screenshot to the left.

Notice. You need to add the email accounts before you can add it as a home screen email widget.

2. Long-Press Home Screen to Enter Edit Home Screen Mode and Add Widget

After adding your email accounts in the Mobile Documents app, go to the home screen where you want to add a email widget. Long-press (press screen for a couple of seconds) anywhere on the home screen and you enter the edit home screen mode (diagonal stripes). Press a “+” to add a widget.

Notice. You may need to remove an existing widget first to make room for a new one. (There are three home screens per default, and you just swipe left or right to switch between them. But you cannot do that in edit home screen mode. In this mode you need to use the dedicated three-dot-button at the bottom to toggle between them.)

3. Select Mail Widget

It’s all very easy, now you just select Mail from the menu. Mobile Documents is integrated with the Symbian native email widget framework. This is perhaps the most intuitive and least intuitive step, at the same time. Because:

Notice. You might look for Mobile Documents here, but in reality selecting the native Mail is the thing to do, deceivingly straight-forward.

4. Choose Mailbox

Now just select the mailbox that you want.

Notice. All mailboxes that you might have set up with both Mobile Documents and Nokia Messaging turns up here. That means that you might see duplicates. Don’t worry if you select the wrong one. You can always delete it and then go back here and select the other. You will notice which app you enter when you tap on the widget. Don’t worry, it’s safe and you can have the same email account set up in both Mobile Documents and Nokia Messaging (the built-in email client) at the same time.

5. Done and You’re Done

Easy, press done and you’re done. Or, continue to set up more. Just repeat the applicable steps above for each new widget on every home screen where you would like a widget. Per home screen you can have up to four email widgets. If you add more (which is possible) they just will not get updated.

After you’re done, your home screen may look like the screenshot to the left. Perhaps you would like to add the Mobile Documents app shortcut as well. How to do that is very similar and you can figure it out yourself.

Enjoy the widgets!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 11th, 2011 at 9:02 am and is filed under Screenshots, Tutorial. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.