Jajah on an unsupported cellphone

Update May 30th 2007: Looks like you can also initiate calls and change your source number at mobile.jajah.com. Check it out. It might still be worth constructing bookmarks as I show here in order to save on transfer. Thanks to the anonymous commenter below!

I’m always on the look out for ways to get cheaper airtime. My plan includes free incoming calls while I’m in my local zone, so when I heard about Jajah I saw an opportunity. What Jajah does is call both you and your recipient, then form a bridge between you two. Now rather than being an outgoing call on your cell phone it’s an incoming call. The person who initiates the call will have to pay Jajah, about three cents US per minute in the US and Canada. That’s a lot cheaper than using my package minutes!

Unfortunately my phone isn’t officially supported by Jajah. Even worse, I can’t install any J2ME applications that aren’t approved by Fido. I could just use a callback instead, but what kind of geek would I be if I didn’t at least try to work around this?

I discovered that Jajah submits its requests through either a SMS or a HTTP request. Jajah has two numbers to send SMSes to, unfortunately neither one was reachable from my phone. The US shortcode wasn’t routed from Fido and the European one returned an error in German. Oh well, I get free data but not SMS, so this is no big loss for me.

There are four basic requests you can make over HTTP. You can place a call, request your balance, request the number you’re calling from, and change the number you’re calling from. All of these requests require a numeric user ID and PIN. Unfortunately, these aren’t related to your typical Jajah username and password. I noticed that my PIN stayed the same even after I changed my password so it’s likely randomly generated when you create your account. Not to worry, it’s not difficult to find.

To get your username and password, first log in to Jajah and download the client from the mobile tools page.

The make and model of the phone doesn’t matter, just make sure you select Download to PC. Save it to somewhere easy to find and then extract the JAD file. Open it in notepad to and look for your USER-ID and USER-PIN fields.

With these UID and PIN numbers you can construct a number of URLs in order to make Jajah requests. I’ve hacked up something in javascript to help. If you point your JavaScript-enabled phone to my script (conveniently located at http://imaddicted.ca/other/jajah-javascript.html – doesn’t that have a nice ring to it?) you’ll find four text boxes, four buttons and three radio buttons.

Anything you do will require you to enter in your User ID and PIN. Making a call will also require your destination number, changing your origin will require your origin number. There are three different modes of operation for this script: Bookmark, Go to and Link.

The most convenient method would be Bookmark. When you select Bookmark and click one of the buttons the script will attempt to create a bookmark that’ll carry out the function you selected. Unfortunately, this is an Internet Explorer only feature and doesn’t work on my phone. Maybe Pocket PC users will have some use for it.

The next best option is the Link feature. This will create a link for you to bookmark. I noticed that my Hiptop2 doesn’t update the link text but it does update the link URL, so it’s still usable. For those whose phones don’t support that particular javascript method there’s one more hope.

That hope is the Go to method. What this feature does is execute the command by moving your browser to the command URL. After it has executed you can bookmark the page you’re taken to in order to save yourself some effort next time.If the Go to feature doesn’t work, well, you’ll need to construct the URLs yourself. Have fun!

Tip: Right now there’s no validation at all on this script. Remember to properly format your phone numbers: Use three digit country codes and remember your area codes. Americans and Canadians, your country code is 001.

Tip #2: I’ve got some plaintext sample URLs posted.