Not long ago, Steve Morrey proclaimed... > With the recent Blackberry service outages, I thought it might be a > good idea to search for a replacement. > I have found a free alternative that I thought I would share with the group. > > As it turns out every SMS capable phone is actually able to receive > emails as well (albeit the character count may be limited). > All you have to do is set up, simple email forwarding with your email > provider to the SMS gateway.
Yeah- there are a lot of problems with this strategy. The first, you
already mentioned, is the size limitation of messages. My experience is
that most carriers limit SMS to between 100 and 200 characters. This is
going to make reading HTML e-mail near impossible. Second, you usually have
no control over the return address. People might send e-mail to
[EMAIL PROTECTED] and when you reply to the
message with your phone, it'll come from
[EMAIL PROTECTED] Thirdly, most non-smartphones I've
used have a ridiculously small internal buffer for text messages. Receive
more than something like 20 or 30 messages and your message memory is full.
Bleh. What about attachments? Forget about it.
My wife has a Blackberry Pearl. One of my employees has a Blackberry Curve.
A good friend of mine also has the Curve. While the Blackberry offers near
perfect integration with Exchange, it doesn't quite make it to the bar in
most any other area. So, if Exchange integration isn't a top priority, stay
away from the Blackberry products. There are plenty of other options
available.
I'm still partial to the PalmOS Treo line. The Centro is a really nice
product and is much easier to configure and operate than the Blackberry.
Most people I know that have used both a Treo/Centro and a Blackberry say
they're much more productive with a stylus than with the nipple/trackball
on the Blackberry.
I use my Treo 700p with a program called Chatteremail and this provides a
very "Blackberry-esque" experience. Chatteremail was developed by a third
party developer, but impressed Palm enough they bought the rights and now
employ the developer, making Chatteremail an official Palm product. It
supports POP and IMAP very well and apparently has Exchange plugins too
(which I don't use, thank you very, very much.)
I receive messages for three e-mail accounts (and multiple IMAP folders)
with Chatteremail. It does have some drawbacks though. While it does
support SSL/TLS connections, it doesn't support any kind of cryptography
for encryption or signing of messages. It does support signatures, which I
think is awesome. It also supports quoting of messages using the >
character, but it doesn't quite do it right because it still drops you at
the top of the quoted message. This is probably because the creators of
Chatteremail came out of an Exchange/Windows-driven e-mail culture and
despite their ability to write a kick-butt mobile e-mail application, they
fail to understand the RightWay(tm) to correspond via e-mail. Idiots.
The iPhone seems like a tremendous step in the "awesome" direction and, if
nothing else, will drive the market for smart phones toward greater
usability and (hopefully) reliability.
I for one am waiting with bated breath for a Android-based smartphone with
a (hard) QWERTY keyboard. I am excited about the Android devices for many
reasons but at the top of the list is the fact it will be running on top of
a Linux kernel and the API is open for anyone to develop for. That seems to
promise a much greater liklihood of mobile applications that will just work
and work the way you want them to as opposed to the way your mobile carrier
wants them to.
Good luck.
--
[EMAIL PROTECTED] is Doran L. "Fozz" Barton
"Take notice: When this sign is under water, this road is impassable."
-- Seen on an Athi River highway
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