Cheap mobile office setup - updated

In September, I set up a mobile office for $1K. Emoze, the software I used to simulate push email on my WM6 device (a Tmobile Dash), was ok, but it wasn't great. It had to be running on both my laptop and my phone (neither of which has a ton of memory), if my laptop hibernated it would take down my email link, and when I moved items around on my calendar, Emoze didn't always keep up. I only had to go to the wrong place at the wrong time for a meeting once to start looking around for an updated setup.

At first, I shifted to Hotmail. Hotmail is really well integrated with WM6 - on the surface. It pushes email, syncs the device to the web, is easy to set up. Unfortunately, it has a few quirks: (1) When you send an email from the WM6 device, no "to" field shows up on the Hotmail website. So the email goes through fine, but you can't easily find it in Hotmail by sorting later; (2) When you send an email from WM6, it doesn't adhere to the "from" field you set up at Hotmail.com. I didn't want people to use my hotmail address, since I wasn't sure I'd stay, so I set up to show the "from" line using my alumni account. That worked fine from Hotmail, but strangely, not from the mobile phone (which is supposed to be synced with Hotmail). I could have lived with those, I think, but the TrueSwitch service, provided by a third party through a deal with Hotmail, was absolutely terrible. TrueSwitch was supposed to transfer my Gmail in a nice organized way to Hotmail. Instead, it forwarded 50,000 messages to my Hotmail inbox, didn't organize any of them, ad then just stopped (so not even all of my messages made it over). After a few emails to tech support (where they promised a 36 hour resolution), I got a response saying they didn't know what happened and would have to send it to engineering. Nice customer service. Nice partner you've chosen, Microsoft!

I went back to Gmail and set it up for IMAP access that is native on the WM6 phone. It's not quite push, but it checks frequently enough that it might as well be (that hurts my battery life a bit, but it's livable). Unfortunately, I also have to use the Gmail Java WM6 application to see some emails, because there's a known bug in Gmail IMAP that prevents HTML messages from showing on WM6. At least I can see the header on something like a push basis and switch to the Java app if necessary. The integration of Gmail IMAP and Outlook isn't great - items deleted from my phone go to a deleted items folder, but not items deleted from Outlook, for instance - but at least I have the Dash, the web, and the laptop all synced on email. When Google fixes the HTML email problem, this should be a pretty solid setup, without the extra overhead of Emoze. Without Emoze, I don't have my calendar synced to Outlook wirelessly, but I'm working on that - no sync is better than faulty sync.

During this switchover, I was struck by Microsoft's squandered opportunity. Here I am ready to switch from using Gmail, which is not meeting my needs, to Hotmail. I use a Windows PC, I'm addicted to Outlook, and I have a Windows Mobile cell phone. If I switch, I'm locked in to all Microsoft all the time. But their integration is so clunky - need the Outlook Connector to get Outlook connected to Hotmail, inconsistent use of the "from" and "to" fields across the three platforms, no free calendar sync, and the partnership with Trueswitch that made my Hotmail account unusable - that I had to go back to using Gmail, even though it has some quirks too. Google will have its own devices soon and will likely make the integrations smoother, so if MSFT doesn't take advantage of opportunities to capture users like this now, they may be too late.

Technorati: cheap mobile office, Trueswitch, Gmail, Hotmail, Microsoft, Google