Mobile phone and PDA users are now being offered more and more ways to send and receive email. T-Mobile in the UK (formerly One2One) is next month expected to launch Officelink, which will give customers access to the documents on their company server via a personal digital assistant (PDA).
It will also introduce the BlackBerry, a device for sending and receiving emails sans attachments. Last month, Vodafone added an all-in-one PDA and phone, the HP Jornada 928, and the BlackBerry to its range. Its BlackBerry service, which includes unlimited emails, costs less than £1 a day.
It costs more if fewer than 100 people in a company buy it. The device costs £305. Peter Erskine, chief executive of rival operator O2, the first mobile operator to provide BlackBerry in the UK, says, "about 320 companies have them. "The device has an general packet radio services connection subject to network coverage".
It is also possible to use the humble mobile for email. Alastair Gilchrist, head of e-commerce at EasyJet, gets email updates from the eBay auction site on his tiny Nokia 8310. He has a simple email address, and mail arrives as a mobile text message (or SMS).
The service is best for short emails. If messages are longer than 160 characters, they are continued in the next SMS. Gilchrist, who launched the service as group product manager at One2One, uses it regularly. Deev Piddock, an artist, also uses the service and has an email address based on his mobile number. It appealed to him because he doesn't have a desktop PC.
When friends want to invite him to dinner, they email him on his phone. However, he says: "The messages get cut off in their prime; they are about 10 words long. I know I'm invited to dinner and who by, but not what time."
It looks as though he has been set up with the headline-only service, which just gives you the main header of the message and a bit of text.
There are, in fact, three options of one, two or three SMSs worth of email text. But when trying to implement email on a mobile, hassles are nothing new. Though potentially a great source of revenue, operators are poor at explaining how to use it. I was recently lent an XDA PDA by O2, which enables you to make calls and connect to the net.
I thought it would be ideal for connecting to Hotmail and picking up messages forwarded from Compuserve. This proved problematic. Apart from great difficulty in connecting to GPRS, to sign on to Hotmail via O2 you need to know the website address for connecting via a PDA. Oddly enough, O2 did not seem to have it to hand and it is not mentioned on the Hotmail site. For the record, it is www.mobile.msn.com.
You have to register and specify what device you are using. Thereafter, you type http://mobile. msn.com/pocketpc. For Yahoo Mail, go to http://mobile.yahoo.com or use Yahoo.com and click on the tiny dot to the right of the main logo. If you want your emails read to you, try Virgin Mobile's email reader. It costs 20p a minute and you can listen to email from a variety of services - including Freeserve and BT Openworld - using the POP3 email protocol. Alison Bonny, of Virgin, says: "You can delete or reply to email messages using the email reader. When you reply, your voice is recorded and attached to the email as a WAV sound file."
Vxtras email from Virgin is accessible via Wap for between 5p and 15p a minute. Vodafone's Mobile Email is available to anyone on a UK network on a pay-as-you-go basis. It can be used to access or listen to up to five internet email accounts but not AOL or Hotmail. To use services such as the Virgin or Vodafone ones, you fill in a form on the operator's website but then you just use your mobile. Bonny points out that:
"New phones like the Sony Ericsson T68i have a built-in POP3/IMAP4 email client allowing direct access to email accounts." And Vodafone's Toby Robson uses the same phone with a Compaq iPaq for instant messaging. The newest solutions are not always the best, though. Bridget Blow, chief executive of the outsourcing company ITNet swears by her Nokia Communicator, one of the first all-in-one phones cum email devices. Email may be a killer application, but it is often a killer to get working.
