Vodafone Business Email: works for yokels too

Vodafone has announced a push email service that works with smartphones such as the Nokia 6680 and Sony Ericsson P910i. Although it's branded as a business service, you don't need a suit to sign up. If you're a regular ol' consumer, chewin' on a stalk of wheat, there's a personal version that lets you access Internet email via your phone, for an all-in price of £10 or £15 per month.

It's a push service, so emails are forwarded to your mobile automatically, much like SMS messages. You can have your inbox with you all the time (could be heaven, could be hell) and respond to new messages immediately. You can also open and edit attachments such as Word documents.

If readin' and writin' ain't your strongest suits, you can take snapshots of your cows and tractors, then email them back to the barn. Because it's a flat-rate service, you can photograph the entire herd without worrying about the cost of transmitting the images. If you're paying £40 per month or more for voice calls, adding email costs £10 per month; on lower tariffs it's £15. As long as you're in the UK, data usage is included in the monthly tariff. (If you get one of them newfangled passport things and start photographing foreign cows, you'll pay an extra £10.28 per megabyte.)

Vodafone Business Email (VBE) can be added to any voice tariff and will be available on the HP hw6510, Motorola MPX220, Nokia 6680, Nokia 9300, Sony Ericsson P910i, VPA Compact and Vodafone v1620 from early December. The next phones to be added will be the Nokia N70, Vodafone v1240 and Vodafone v1640. -ML