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Reading E-Mail

Mobile e-mail is a great reason to buy a wireless PDA. The technology permits you to send and receive e-mail on the move, opening all sorts of possibilities (such as e-mailing your boss while you're on the way home). All the devices we used can send and receive e-mail, and the messages we sent were delivered quickly and without fuss, as long as we were within the coverage area (see "Mobile or Miserable?").

But writing long messages on these devices proved frustrating: The only one to pass our crucial stuck-in-line-at-the-DMV test was the RIM Blackberry 957--entering text on its small QWERTY keyboard was far quicker and more accurate than using the Palm-style system of writing the shapes of letters with a stylus. Both Palms and the IPaq device allow you to tap a keyboard on the screen, but doing this isn't much quicker than using their shorthand versions.

All the services we examined let you retrieve e-mail from any POP3 e-mail server (used by most ISPs), but remember to access your regular e-mail account with caution: Big file attachments will take ages to download and will quickly fill up your entire PDA.

Fortunately, the e-mail programs on the devices that we reviewed allow you to filter messages from your regular e-mail account, leaving any that exceed a specified size on the server for you to retrieve later. The portals also give you an e-mail account on their service, although this setup may have limitations. The Palm.Net e-mail service, for example, refuses to accept any e-mail message larger than 51KB and bounces it back to the sender with a notice that the server can't accept it.

Various instant messaging services such as Yahoo Messenger (for Palm and PocketPC) and AOL Instant Messenger (for Palm) are now available for wireless Internet devices. We found them to be a nice alternative for shorter and more urgent messages.

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