What's Online

It's amazing how many companies are competing to give you their services for free these days. They obviously see phone-enabled mobile computing as the Next Big Market, and they're all positioning themselves to capture a segment of it. This makes my job easy. All I have to do is keep my eyes open and report on some of the more impressive new offerings I find.

In the last issue I covered free mapping services. In this one, I'll take a look at a couple free services offering push e-mail, a free voicemail service that offers multiple outgoing messages, some free mobile search options, and some new technologies that promise to change the way you access the Internet via your mobile device.

Free push e-mail

Made popular by BlackBerry devices, push e-mail simply means that e-mail arrives on your device immediately after it arrives on your e-mail server. You don't need to check your e-mail, sync, or even set your device to download e-mail at intervals.

For more information about push e-mail, check out the "Direct Push Guide" on the Tech at Play Web site (http://techatplay.com/articles). Among the articles in this section, you'll find a great introduction to push e-mail and a multipart article on Microsoft's Direct Push technology by author Paul Mah. Another of the articles covers "The Future of Direct Push" and is based on the features of Microsoft Exchange 2007, which was released late last year.

In a Microsoft Exchange server setup, your e-mail and Personal Information Management (PIM) data (such as Calendar and Contacts) reside on a central server. Your desktop computer and mobile device interact with your data on the central server so that any change you make, such as deleting an e-mail or changing a contact's information, is automatically reflected in the Exchange Server data and is automatically synced to your desktop computer. The Exchange Server automatically keeps everything in sync so that you don't need to worry about what data is where.

Emoze push e-mail service

Emoze (http://emoze.com), not only offers push e-mail but also many of the advantages of Microsoft Exchange Server. Emoze announced its free e-mail/PIM service in April of 2006 and claims to be "the world's first free and secure push e-mail and PIM service"—in a sense, a free corporate Exchange server for the masses. To use the service, you simply need to have an e-mail account and a compatible device and download the software for both your computer and your device. This easy-to-set-up service combines push e-mail with instant Calendar and Contacts synchronization. You're able to receive your Outlook e-mail and PIM data anywhere, anytime.

The Emoze Web site says that they use military-grade encryption to keep your data secure and that they don't duplicate your data on their servers. The also say that the data is compressed so that its transmission is quick and uses your connect time and device memory efficiently.

The service is independent of network technology and works on any wireless GSM, CDMA, or Wi-Fi network. It works with Outlook, Microsoft Exchange and other servers, as well as with POP3 online services, including Yahoo, Hotmail, and Gmail.

Consilient free push e-mail

Consilient (http://consilient.com) also aims to bring push e-mail to the masses. Unlike Emoze, it doesn't appear to offer PIM synchronization. It lets users access up to five Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, Gmail, POP3, or IMAP4 accounts, but the ability to access multiple accounts isn't available yet for Windows Mobile devices, nor is the feature that lets you send attachments. It runs over any GSM/GPRS network (such as T-Mobile and Cingular) in the U.S. and some CDMA networks (such as Sprint and Verizon in the U.S. and Aliant and Telus in Canada).