Spring 2006

How would you like to be able to access your email from any mobile phone - without having to set up Exchange Server software (or something similar) on your computer?

A company called inVue is making this a key marketing proposition for its inHand mobile email product, which it is promoting as "a BlackBerry-like application for the smaller business".

The thrust behind its argument is that currently mobile email systems tend to be the domain of corporate users. Mobile units tend to be linked to enterprise email servers, leaving smaller business and individual users feeling (rightly or wrongly) that they are marginalised.

The inHand system attempts to pull such users into the fold, offering them email access without any corporate software to install.

 

There is a catch of a kind, in that you have to subscribe to the inHand service, and hire space for your data on its own servers. Prices start at £14.99 a month, which includes 100MB of shared storage. And of course you need to integrate your email with this arrangement.

However, there is no other specialist software to install on your computer, and the company says you can use the system with any handset. And you get a whole range of optional added features such as document storage, version control and a kind of customer relationship management and lead tracking.

inVue is a UK-based company, which was set up in 2001 by two entrepreneurs, Greg Rice and Pierre Wilter, both having extensive experience of IT, the Internet and business affairs.

What could be an even simpler solution to mobile email access, RemoMail, has just been launched in the US by Remoba, a mobile applications specialist. Following a quick software download, users are said to be able to access up to five POP or IMAP email accounts directly, without going through a third-party server. However, the system is currently limited to phones using Qualcomm's BREW mobile solution. Sounds appealing, though.