Kontact Touch

Kontact Touch is an email and groupware client for touch screen devices, like smartphones, netbooks or tablets. It is a sister product to Kontact Desktop based on the same backend, a full featured Kolab Groupware Client and providing end-to-end email security. Kontact Touch is based on the KDE Platform and produced by the KDE PIM and KDE Mobile initiatives. Here are the about dialog and some screenshots and videos.

Kontact Touch is a usable application since February 2011. Your experience will depend a lot on the packaging and platform integration for your device, though. Feedback and help is always appreciated.

Installation and Update

Use the instructions for your device,

• N900: Maemo5
• HTC Touch Pro2 or similiar: Windows Mobile 6.5
• Ideapad or similiar: MeeGo
• N950/N9 : Harmattan

Getting started

Starting Kontact Touch

After installation you will find five new icons on your phone that open the mail, calendar, addressbook, notes and tasks frontends to Kontact Touch.

Touch one of these and it will start. Note that the first start of any of these applications will take a long time, as it has to initialise the backend. Expect an initial waiting time around a minute.

Experts: You can start everything from the command line if you like, but then check the notes for your platform for the right executable names.

Setting up your accounts

First thing you would want to do is set up a new email account. To do this you start mail, pull the flap Actions on the Homepage out, press Accounts, Add Account and then follow the instructions.

Note

you cannot do this from all frontends at the moment - but for email it works fine. If you should have a Kolab Server, all other applications will access the data from your server too.

You may change the following settings, by choosing the account and use Configure Account:

• Switch off interval sync while the initial sync is in progress. You can turn it on later.
• Switch off handling of server side subscriptions (otherwise you might not see some folders you are expecting to see).
• Enable disconnected mode for email if the number of emails you have is not that high in total. It means a longer initial sync, but afterwards only changes get synced and the emails will be fully cached on the device.

Warning

Kontact Touch uses several process to send and fetch data. By default it will try to encrypt them all. If something called KWallet comes up: use it! It will save your password, so you do not have to retype it each time.

Several server authentification warnings might appear for the different connections, because the SSL or TLS connection certificates are not known to the system. Both kwallet and multiple authentification warnings indicate that your platform integration is suboptimal.

Understanding the Interaction ideas

Navigate through your folders by our flatten tree view. You can also choose to see multiple folders at once, when you click on Select on the homepage.

Actions can be accessed through what we call flaps. You have to pull them out, in order to not mix interaction up with clicking through your accounts and folders.

We hope the other ideas are straight forward and discoverable. If you have any question please feel free to ask us.

Get encryption working

One of the core features of Kontact Touch is the ability to communicate safely using S/MIME or OpenPGP. We advise you to first set up your personal certificate and secret key on a desktop computer, e.g. by using Kleopatra. Then transfer it to the device and import everything using Kleopatra. Check out the platform specific installation instructions for more hints.

Contributing / Questions and Answers / Feedback / ...

You discovered a defect

The overall stability of the product is good. It can be trusted will real data and offers a lot of useful functions, because Kontact Touch shares the backend with the desktop client. Still as of July 2012: There are a number of known issues and often there is little platform integration and suboptimal packaging.

Consider doing an update to the latest version available for your platform before reporting a problem. Maybe it has already been solved.

Report a problem

Please report any problems to our issue tracker.

When posting a report, please add some information, so we can efficiently fix any bugs:

• The platform Kontact Touch is running on. (e.g. MeeGo, Mer, OpenSuse)
• Your device's vendor and model. (e.g. N900, N9, Vivaldi, Ideapad)
• The Kontact Touch version you use. (You can find the version number in the about dialog)
• Please report to the correct category: kmail-mobile (Mail), korganizer-mobile (Calendar and Tasks), kjots-mobile (Notes), kaddressbook-mobile (Contacts) or kdepim-mobile for issues that affect all applications.
• If you think that a screenshot might illustrate your problem well, consider making one and add it (see here for finding out how to do screenshots on a N900).
• Please provide any other relevant information, so we can quickly reproduce and fix your problem.

You want to share your experiences?

We are accompanying the development by steady usability work. You are very welcome to participate in this process. For this, but also for less structured feedback, consider joining our mailing list.

You want to contribute to the development

For the people with a more technical view we also communicate via a mailing list.