Setting network permissions for Google Maps Local on S60

In my recent post on Google Local Mobile I mentioned that the phone asks permission before making every network connection (which is a bit annoying.) Fortunately, Charlie Schick posted a comment about it being possible to authorize the application to make network connections. His suggestion worked (yeah!) so I took some screenshots to visually walk through the process on an S60 phone:

Step 1: Find the "Manager" application. I put mine in my "Tools" folder, but yours could be anywhere. Select it to launch the application. (If you didn't know that you can re-arrange the applications and folders on your S60 phone, check out one of my older posts, "Organizing Series 60 application menus".)

Step 2: Find the entry for Google Local, then select the Options menu using the left soft-key:

Step 3: From the Options menu, find the Settings entry and select it:

Step 4: Now find the "Network access" setting (which is the first thing in the list on my phone) and select it:

Step 5: Change the setting to "Ask first time" and click OK:

With this setting change, the Google Local Mobile client will only need to prompt you for a network connection the first time the app gets online. After that, map scrolling and zooming can happen much smoother.

Please be aware that Google Local Mobile uses a lot of network bandwidth and, depending on your mobile plan, it could end up costing you some real money in data fees. I'm on a T-Mobile all-you-can-eat data plan, so I don't worry about it. But that plan adds ~$20/month to your phone bill.