The Hopp Stop

Smartphones and personal e-mail access

I was talking to a couple co-workers on Friday about good phones to get to access personal e-mail on the go. Rather than sending an e-mail to just them, I've posted my thoughts below.

The best personal e-mail program (non-Blackberry or Good) is Chatter, an e-mail program for Palm OS Treos that supports POP (regular old e-mail) and IMAP (newer e-mail tech that stores everything on a server to keep things in sync) accounts. (Google and Yahoo and Hotmail are webmail and Google and Yahoo also support POP access to the accounts.) The reason it rocks is that it has great IMAP support, such that you get full control and access to all your e-mail. E.g., say you read an e-mail on your Treo using Chatter and reply to it, the server is updated to reflect that so that if you then check your mail using a local client (such as Outlook or Thunderbird) or via web access, that e-mail will be marked read, it will have the icon displayed to reflect that you replied to it, and your reply will appear in your sent items folder.

This is to be contrasted with a POP program, where if you download an e-mail from the server and read it, the message is either deleted from the server and only stored locally (in whatever client you are using, perhaps Chatter, perhaps Outlook) or left on the server. Basically, changes are a one-way street with POP; nothing you do to the e-mail after you download it from the server is reflected on the server.

Chatter also supports an advanced feature of IMAP, called IDLE, that provides for instantaneous notifications of new e-mail messages, much like Fenwick's GoodLink setup does.

You need to have an e-mail provider that supports IMAP. I use Fastmail, which offers both free and for-pay accounts, depending on storage levels you want. You should be able to set up an existing account (like a personal Gmail account) to just forward to a new provider like Fastmail (that's what I do for my personal address), so switching to an IMAP provider isn't that big a deal--no need to change addresses.

Treos in general (Palm OS or Windows Mobile) also offer the advantage of having a real slick threaded texting program, such that texts appear as a conversation, much like how an IM conversation appears. It's a huge upgrade over regular texting programs on phones. The Blackjack and the Q can also use TxtMan, a freeware program that provides threaded texting; I have that on my Blackjack.

The downside to Treos:
-Relative to a regular cell phone or a Blackjack, they are pocket bricks.
-The Treo 680 is reasonably priced relative to competition (in same price range as Blackjack), but the 700 models and the 750s are damn expensive.
-Treos historically have had lousy, lousy reliability and phone call quality compared to regular cell phones (I've had two, plus lots of discussion with Fenwickians who have had them). They switched to a new manufacturer for the 680 and 750 and phone quality has supposedly improved. Reliability is an open question.

My Blackjack is working well, biggest issue is the personal e-mail program. There is a potential Chatter equivalent for Windows Mobile called FlexMail, but that program has been in private beta for about 5 months, lots of false promises about when it will be publicly available. Until it is out and proven to be functional, I can't recommend a Windows Mobile phone. (The default program on Windows Mobile Pocket PC phones, like the Treo 750, is supposedly more powerful with decent IMAP support, but those are all pocket bricks and expensive. And as I mentioned, the default program on Windows Mobile Smartphones, like my Blackjack, is crap. Nice nomenclature by Microsoft, by the way. Very consumer-friendly.)

The Blackberry Pearl is worth looking at, although their personal version of Blackberry may be POP-based; I'm not aware that it is as functional as Chatter. Also, the keyboard is not a full QWERTY version and thus uses predictive text input, which some people like and some hate. This would be a good one to test out using the 30-day return period that cell providers offer.