Slashdot Mirror

Have you even looked at Visto's website?
http://www.visto.com/
Market Leaders in providing mobile corporate email, they appear to be RIM's biggest competitor.

When did they develop their mobile email technology? There is the question?

As an example, back in the day they bought Seattle based company called ViAir, the guys who provide the software that does/did AT&T Mobile Email, Nextel Mobile Email, Vodafone Mobile Email and ships with Handsprings. It looks like these are the guys you go for if you don't want a Blackberry device.

IP Squatting this appears not.

Hmm use there pantents to make money? Oh you mean like they do.

http://www.visto.com/partners/wireless.html

You did see that Visto does sell a product right? They DO SELL a product and it is in common use.

http://www.visto.com/partners/wireless.html

So uh maybe RIM is just getting its just rewards for all the sueing it did.

Wow, Visto has no products. I guess their clients will be surprised to hear that. Clients like AT&T Wireless, Bell Mobility, KPN, Manitoba Telecom Services, Nextel Communications, Inc., Rogers Wireless, SaskTel Mobility, SmarTone, TELUS Mobility, Vodafone Global, Vodafone Germany, Vodafone Italy and Vodafone Spain (lifted from http://www.visto.com/about/index.html). "Visto's products are used by over 200,000 mobile professionals globally. Our enterprise customers include GE, Sara Lee, USA Credit Union, and Xerox."

And what are their products? Again, same web page:
"Visto Mobile(TM) is Visto's patented, operator-grade platform for mobile access to corporate and personal email, calendar, contacts (PIM) and other corporate data. Visto Mobile provides secure, IP-push, continuously synchronized, real-time access to email/PIM data for POP3, Microsoft Outlook/Exchange and IBM Lotus Notes/Domino servers via GPRS and CDMA 1x wireless networks. Visto Mobile Enterprise Server and Visto Mobile Personal Edition solutions support WAP and most other browser enabled phones or PCs, along with smart phones using Symbian OS, Palm OS, Windows Mobile for Smartphone and Pocket PC Phone Edition, and J2ME operating systems, as well as IMAP and SyncML-based clients. Visto's customized, brandable solutions are available through to mobile operators worldwide as a hosted service or a fully licensable and integrated platform."

Not exactly NTP....

"Microsoft has a long and well-documented history of acquiring the technology of others, branding it as their own, and entering new markets," said Mr. Bogosian. "In some cases, they buy that technology from its creator. In other cases, they wrongfully misappropriate the intellectual property that belongs to others, which has forced them to acknowledge and settle large IP cases with companies like Sun, AT&T and Burst.com. For their foray into mobile email and data access, Microsoft simply decided to misappropriate Visto's well known and documented patented technology."

Ebbe

> minimal Web surfing (stock quotes, weather,
> traffic, movie showtimes, driving directions?).

No need for a browser! I use my normal (CellOne SF) cell phone and one of the new "voice portals". I'm hooked on Quack.com, but there are others (e.g. TellMe ). A great thing about these is that I don't have to take my hands off the wheel (and my eyes off the road) to get the info while I'm in the car.

> wireless email

OK, until somebody does a good phone-based Text To Speech and voice recognition service, you're back to some other device.

In addition to my CellOne service, I also have WAP through SprintPCS (currently $75 for 2000 minutes/mo). I got the TouchPoint phone which has a larger screen than my Nokia CellOne phone, and is very easy to use. It's my data phone. I also got the connector kit so I can use the phone as a wireless modem. This morning I was using Yahoo Messenger on my Palm III. Works fine.

> Since it seems WAP is a ways off

I disagree. While many web sites don't yet support WML, everything you are asking for is already in place. Visto and Yahoo! already support WAP very well, if you want to do email from there.

One thing I have seen but haven't tried yet - let's say you are standing in the Good Fried Circuit store about to buy some new widget. You think to yourself, "is this a good deal? I should go home and surf the web for prices." Instead, while you're standing in the store, WAP into DealTime Mobile and do some comparison shopping.

There are more interesting WAP services springing up all the time.

Of course now I am travelling around with two cell phones (I like the CellOne service, I just wish they would add WAP), a Palm III and cables. But that's nothing compared to lugging around my laptop and the bulky ricochet modem, which I had to return because my house is outside their service area.

I travel a lot, and I use mainly a laptop (company issued) with Windows 98 on it (yeah, yeah, but I have to use it for Arabic support, as well as exchanging documents with colleagues and customers - so it will stay for a while). I also use a Palm Pilot, and have my home computer (dual boot on Linux).

Moving the data back and forth on these three platforms is a royal pain (in all places!)

My dream would be a web service that allows ALL of the following to be done:

• Access and Reply e-mail from whatever host(s) you access our e-mail from
• Sync my Pilot remotely, so as to have all my e-mails, addresses, appointments both on the Pilot and on that virtual desk top
• Upload and sync all my bookmarks

• Visto Briefcase has most of this, but the sync doesn't work well.
  Netscape Netcenter also has some of this functionality, but the bookmarks do not upload all of them. The same happens to synching my address book. Not all addresses are uploaded (truncation). It has Portfolio, Weather, News which are all nice, but still not the one true desktop
  Other sites I am looking at are
  WorkSpot.Net are a Linux deskop over the net, and was featured in a Slashdot article a few hours ago.
  

  So, I am yet to find an ideal web site that I can use as a one stop shopping for all this.

  Security you say? Who cares? I just have to be aware that there is a potential security issue, and not to put sensitive data there? Same goes for ICQ, ...etc. Regards.
  

  --