Charles F. Moreira

One of the great things about the mobile lifestyle is the ability to communicate anytime from anywhere under mobile coverage, which is practically almost everywhere.
However, sending a fax through a mobile depends on several factors.
The first thing you need to do is to check whether Fax Services is installed on your PC, since you’ll need a fax printer to send faxes.

This comes with Windows XP, but is generally not installed by default, so open Control Panel, click on Add or Remove Programs, then on Add/Remove Windows Components and if you don’t see check mark besides, Fax Services, please check it and click Next. Make sure to have your Windows XP installation CD on hand since at some point it will ask you to insert it in the CD-ROM drive.

Depending on how you plan to communicate with your phone, you’ll most probably need to install an infra-red or Bluetooth dongle driver, or cable driver, followed by the phone management software which contains the various phone drivers.

Once that’s done and your phone is recognised as a fax modem by Windows XP, you can start typing your faxes on your PC and print it to this fax modem as printer.
In our case, I used a PC with a Bluetooth dongle through a Sagem myX6-2 phone using a Celcom prepaid account to send faxes and the setup procedure was as follows.
After installing Fax Services in Windows, I installed the Bluetooth software for my Bluetooth dongle. I also installed the phone driver software provided, though this last step might not have been necessary for all phones.

I then turned on the phone’s Bluetooth and made it visible to all, then clicked on the My Bluetooth Places icon in the task bar at the bottom right of the screen and proceeded to detect a Bluetooth device. I then selected my phone’s icon when it appeared and hit Next to continue and at this stage, it asked for a passkey and I entered “123” and after clicking Next, the phone asked for a passkey and I entered the same one and pressed the “OK” button.
It then displayed all possible Bluetooth services available with my phone, one of them being Fax, which by default is unchecked. I checked that option.

Once that’s done, when you click on My Bluetooth Places, you’ll see all the services supported and their status connected or unconnected status. I clicked on the Fax icon and it connected. At this stage you may also have to go through the pairing process again.
I then went to Printers & Faxes in Control Panel and proceeded to install a Local Fax Printer from the sidebar on the left of the window and it immediately added a Fax printer.
I highlighted and right clicked on the fax printer, then left clicked on Printing Properties to specify paper size, image quality and so on.

I then launched it and on the first time, the wizard took me through the setup process to enter my name, fax number, phone number, send, receive and whether to print received faxes on the attached printer or to store it to a file.



If the wizard doesn’t kick in the first time, you can click Configure Fax under Tools.
That done, I launched my word processor; wrote a fax and proceeded to print it to the fax printer. It then requested details like recipient name, fax number, choice of cover page, subject on cover page, a brief note and so on and sent the fax successfully through the mobile phone.
During this process, the phone asked me to press “OK” to allow the fax service to use it, though other phones will let you specify automatic pairing without confirmation.
Successfully sent faxes are stored in the Sent folder, while unsuccessful ones remain in the Outbox for you to try again.

However, I had problems receiving a fax, despite the fax function being enabled to receive faxes as well. The phone rang and the fax monitor on the PC indicated it was receiving an incoming fax but after a while, it indicated failure to receive a fax.
If you have this problem with your phone, configure your fax number as that of your home or office fax machine, so users will send a fax to it.  

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