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A Wireless E-mail Revelation/Discovery
by
Mark Evans
on Sat 23 Jul 2005 08:23 AM EDT | Permanent Link
This post is either going to come across as Luddite-like or valuable insight - although I suspect it will fall into the former camp. I was travelling this week and had some time to kill before flying back to Toronto. Even though I was at a large U.S. airport, there were no signs of an Internet cafe or kiosk, and I gave up my Blackberry a few months ago. I either had to beg to use someone's laptop or read USA Today for a second time. Then, it struck me to try my Telus wireless phone, which comes with Web access. With some trepidation, I surfed to Yahoo Mail and, within minutes, I was checking my work and personal e-mail. It wasn't lightnining-fast and nowhere near a Blackberry-like experience but it was definitely good enough. In fact, I'm been checking my e-mail on a regular basis since this "discovery". The price is 2 cents a page so I figure it costs me 20 to 30 cents each time I do it. That works out to about $10 a month, which is much less than the cost of a Blackberry. Until I accessed e-mail this way, I was far from sold on the idea of people using their wireless phones to do it. Sure, Research in Motion has talked about Blackberry Connect while rivals such as Visto and Seven have been pursuing deals with carriers. They didn't, however, seem very user-friendly. Now, however, I've fallen into the mobile e-mail camp - the mainstream, budget-conscious one where you don't necessarily need a Blackberry or Treo. As wireless carriers pursue more ARPU, e-mail could be a nice revenue stream if they market it properly and sell the service at a reasonable price. So there you go, I've come clean on wireless e-mail, which may or may not be news to many other people out there.
Comments
Re: A Wireless E-mail Revelation/Discovery
by
Anonymous
on Sat 23 Jul 2005 03:57 PM EDT | Permanent Link
It's great for checking e-mail, and in this sense it's not much of a discovery. The problem is sending, which is why Blackberry and Treo and others with typing-friendly keyboards are a preference, particularly for business users who live and breath the ability to communicate -- back and forth -- through e-mail. It's also not push e-mail. Combine those two factors together and the limitations of mobile e-mail over a cellphone are crystal clear.
Re: Re: A Wireless E-mail Revelation/Discovery
by
Anonymous
on Mon 25 Jul 2005 07:12 AM EDT | Permanent Link
For a long time I thought the BlackBerry folks would start selling their technology as software on other people's devices for consumer stuff such as Yahoo mail or other POP3 enabled mail. They could run it through their operations center and the marginal cost would be minimal. They could allow carriers to sell this consumer "lite" version of BlackBerry for $10 and collect $2-3 of that revenue for themselves.
If you could get a lite version of BlackBerry on a phone as a consumer for $10 per month, would you worry much about competition from visto, seven, and the others? |
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