April 2007

As I said in one of my Online Calendaring posts, I’ve been using Mobile2Web.com to get email to my cellular phone. I decided to expand the to contacts and calendar and also to use their OWA interface more. Since it’s a free service, there’s advertising that goes along with it, and I’m fine with that. But, it degraded the user interface to the point that I couldn’t really use it as my primary interface and, with the free service, you get OWA and mobile access, you DON’T get access from Outlook. In looking around, I found that 1 and 1 has a Hosted Exchange account for $6.99/month. I signed up and have been using it for a couple of weeks, now. I have to say, I’m quite pleased with it. It’s a joy to update a contact on my mobile phone, have it reflected on my OWA interface and also reflected back to my Contacts folder in Outlook … and KNOW that updating ANYTHING from ANYWHERE will be handled just as seamlessly. If you’re interested in signing up for any 1-and-1 services, if you’d go through this link and I’ll get some credit for it.

I know, Outlook isn’t perfect — far from it! But it’s the best I’ve got right now. As always, I’m open to alternatives and if you have one, please forward it on!

1-800-GOOG-411 (1-800-466-4411) will hook you up to Google local search. Give a city and state and then say the business name or category and it’ll read you matches.