Bye Bye BlackBerry, Say Teleflip Aficionados

By MARTHA McKAY, STAFF WRITER

Do you have Blackberry envy?

If you’re in business, you might.

For anyone who leaves the office and wants to keep tabs on their e-mail, a pricey BlackBerry smart phone used to be the only answer.

Now there’s a low-cost alternative service that turns your own cellphone into a kind of BlackBerry.

A company called Teleflip will "flip" your phone, delivering e- mail to your cellphone in the form of text messages.

Here’s how it works.

On Teleflip’s Web site, you enter your cellphone number, your e- mail address, and your password. Then you enter the e-mail addresses of anyone from whom you wish to receive mail on your phone.

Teleflip searches your e-mail account for messages from recipients you have chosen and delivers them to your cellphone in the form of a text message.

The Web site is simple to use, and "flipping" your phone takes only a few minutes. I started receiving e-mail from my colleagues easily. As you might imagine, there are limitations.

You can’t receive e-mail attachments, or files with photos or videos. And you need to place a limit on the size of the file (you specify number of lines per message) being delivered since Teleflip uses a cellphone’s text messaging feature.

BlackBerrys won so many fans because they use so-called "push" technology. The service reaches into your e-mail in-box, then "pushes" or delivers the e-mail to your BlackBerry. And Teleflip works in a similar way, with your e-mail arriving on any phone that uses the so-called SMS (short message service), which basically means all the major carriers..

There are free services such as Gmail or Yahoo e-mail, which let you access e-mail on your phone. But since those services are Web- based, they require you to purchase Web access from your cell carrier and in some cases download applications to your phone. And every time you want to check your e-mail you need to access the Internet from your cellphone, which can cost you.

Signing up for Teleflip, which launched its service this month, is free. The young company plans to use an ad-based model, eventually sending a small ad at the bottom of the message, explained CEO Tony Davis.

Davis said he’s spoken to businesses eager to use Teleflip, save the cost of buying BlackBerrys, and give e-mail access to a group of employees who can use the service on their own cellphones.

In one case, a businesswoman using Teleflip traveling to New York entered the e-mail addresses of her top clients and received and responded to e-mail while walking down the street, Davis said.

He also points out that you won’t receive spam since Teleflip delivers e-mail only from the people you specify.

There are, as always, some caveats.

If you don’t have unlimited text messaging on your phone you will have to pay your cellphone carrier for each message delivered. It’s worth doing a cost-benefit analysis to see if paying for text messaging is a cheaper option than buying a BlackBerry (it probably is).

Also, you will be entrusting your business information (cellphone numbers, e-mail account passwords) to Teleflip, and that may be a consideration. Teleflip is a 3-year-old company based in California with about $4.5 million in venture capital funding and an enthusiastic CEO in Davis. The company does not keep your e-mail on its servers, encrypts your messages, and pledges to protect your information.

Then there’s the corporate e-mail issue.

If you work at a larger company, you may run into problems. I couldn’t get my business e-mail delivered because The Record’s IT department was, not surprisingly, unwilling to have Teleflip software sniffing around its mail servers looking for my e-mail. Larger businesses also typically have substantial firewalls and other security protecting their networks.

Davis said his company is working on a solution for businesses that will be available next month.

Davis also apologized for the five days it took for Teleflip to answer a question that I e-mailed them when I had problems initially setting up my account (I was running into the corporate firewall issue). The company currently has 15 employees and is getting up to speed, he said.

To test the service, I signed up instead using a personal Yahoo e- mail account. And while the text messages were not delivered instantaneously (one took almost 15 minutes from the time a colleague sent it to arrive on my phone), it still worked reliably well.

It turns out the company checks e-mail every 15 minutes, so you can’t expect instant gratification. But it’s pretty good. They plan to introduce a premium service at the end of the year or first quarter 2008 that will send e-mail much faster. Pricing has not been set.

Teleflip is one of those services that you want to succeed if only because they’ve figured out a way to use existing networks to deliver something of value e-mail for free or very low cost.

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E-mail: mckay@northjersey.com

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