Bells And Whistles For Cell Phones
I've recently been testing two new services that make it easier to use your cell phone to send and receive text messages or e-mail. One, called Pinger, lets you use your voice to send and receive messages. The other, called Flurry, turns an average cell phone into what I call "a poor man's Blackberry" allowing you to read and respond to your email from a regular cell phone.
Pinger has recently launched a service that allows you to use your voice and ears instead of your fingers and eyes to send and receive messages through your cell phone. The service allows you to dictate voice messages from your cell phone to be delivered to an email address or another person's cell phone. It's currently free but the company does plan to charge for it after a testing period.
Of course, you don't need a special service to leave voice mail but this is different. You don't ring someone's phone and leave a message if they don't pick up. In this case, you're using voice to send the equivalent of an email when you want to leave a message but don't necessarily want to talk to the person. Likewise, the person can respond and send you a voice message that you can retrieve from your PC or your cell phone.
You start by signing up on the web and using the web interface to enter the names and phone numbers of your friends and associates. Or you can import that data from Outlook, Gmail, AOL and other services. I tested it by successfully importing nearly 1,700 contacts from by Gmail contact list and once they were imported, I was to initiate messages to people simply by speaking their names,
When you're ready to send a message you dial a phone number that Pinger provides (which of course you first put in your cell phone's directory) and then speak the person's name. Pinger will then ask you to dictate the message which it will send to the person via email. The message will arrive as an audio file that they can listen on their computer. Or you can send it to a person's cell phone. In that case, they get a text message informing them that they have a voice message along with a phone number to dial to retrieve that message. That service requires that both parties register to use the service so it's best used between acquaintances that you call on a regular basis.
Unlike many advanced cell phone services, you don't need to download any software to your phone and it works with virtually all recent phones and carriers.
One downside: Some people can be quite verbose when leaving text messages making it time consuming and annoying when what all you really want to hear is "Hi this is Susie – call me back at 555-1212."
Flurry take a very different approach to letting you use your cell phone to receive and send email from your existing personal or business email account. It doesn't use voice but does let you read and respond to your mail from your phone. It also lets you subscribe to RSS feeds for news alerts.
It works with most Java equipped phones which include most cellular services and phones sold in the last couple of years. It's compatible with many but not all cellular carriers. When you sign-up for a free account, you'll find out if your phone and carrier are compatible.
You establish your Flurry account by gong to the company Web site where you enter your cell phone number, the name or your provider and other information. If all goes well, Flurry then sends a text message to your cell phone with a Web address that you click on to download the required software to your phone.
The service is designed to work with your existing personal or company email account that use either the Pop3 or IMAP email protocols along with Web-based e-mail such as AOL, Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo. I tested it with a Gmail account and a Samsung phone on the Sprint network. Some company email services might not work, depending on their security protocols.
When you're ready to check your mail, you run the Flurry application from the applications menu of your phone and it quickly downloads all your email headers (information such as the subject and who it's from) via the cell phone network. When you click on a message, it quickly downloads the text. I find that using Flurry to read mail from a cell phone is just as easy as reading it on a Blackberry, Treo or SmartPhone. The only drawback when responding is that you have to tap out the letters on your phone's numeric keypad.
Spam is a problem with any email but especially if you have to look at the mail on a small cell phone. To deal with this Flurry has filters you set up on their web site that lets you control whose mail you can and can not receive. You could, for example, decide to only accept mail from family members or colleagues.
Flurry doesn't charge for the service but plans to make its money by offering premium services. You do need a cell phone data plan which could cost you as much as $10 a month depending on your cell phone carrier. Since the service tells you about incoming messages via a text-message you might also want to subscribe to a text messaging plan.
By Larry Magid