Mobile phones help accountants improve client service

it is hard to find any fault with the latest Curve 8900 model for its general ease of use and reliability. In terms of functionality, it is probably is the best piece of kit I have ever used.

apologies if it sounded sceptical - I was genuinely asking the question to see how I could make use of my BB and other applications more.

The next user comments about enterprise costing £1k - you can get free professional software for 1 user and 4 additional user licences for about £50 each

I am not certain what the full difference is with the all singing dancing enterprise - I understand that you have a separate server and can see full HTML email on BBs rather than just certain handsets

John - as you say I use BB with full wireless synchronisation with emails, calendar and tasks as well as notes. I can track emails received and sent from/in my curve and manage tasks and meeting requests on the go. I also use full wireless sync of outlook contacts with the blackberry adress book and this conveniently enable sone to navigate to these contacts using the telmap service.

On a personal front, I use facebook occassionally and the web browser. Often people comment on the fact that you cant view/edit office docs on a BB which is why they go for a windows mobile device - that is untrue - you can view office docs/pdfs and with software (eg dataviz documents to go) can edit. I understand that this comes with certain BBs and or the updated accredited OS which can usually be dowloaded from your service provider. I use O" and find it great.

Please would someone care to enlighten me on the applications which can be used on the move apart from using the curve as a phone, email and calendaring tool. I use the GPS (sat nav) and email/calendar on BES

What else can we use as accountants?

To be fair I didn't seriously consider a blackberry or the other alternatives.

Windows VISTA was the last straw for me so, as I don't have to worry about compatibility across a big office network, I decided to move to Apple. It was for this reason that I wanted my phone to be compatible.

I only get emails when I ask it to check for them but that's fine. Emails only have the appearance of urgency. If it's critical the phone (or texting) is better and gets to me straight away.

Synchronising itunes (and especially re podcasts) is a doddle. I don't have any games on the iphone but I am amassing a range of useful free applications.

So far I haven't experienced a downside. (I have no problem with the 'keyboard' which I've now been using happily for 9 months).

Mark Lee
Tax Advice Network

As I'm now out of the office a lot more than I used to be, I needed a phone where I could easily pick up my e-mails.

Having started off using Outlook to pick up my e-mail, I looked at a BlackBerry, until I discovered that to get the full use of Outlook there, I'd have to buy BlackBerry Enterprise Solution for a whopping £1,000. That's a lot of money for a one-woman start-up business like mine!

Without Enterprise Solution, as I later found, the only serious problem is not being able to see sent mail from a BlackBerry. But by then I'd already switched to Google Mail.

I haven't yet got my advanced phone, but I plan to get a Palm Treo 500, which will let me pick up my Google Mail, doesn't have any frills that I don't really need (like GPS, Bluetooth, or radio), is available on Pay as You Talk, and has a full QWERTY keyboard.

M

The notion that iPhones are for fun and Blackberrys for the 'serious' user is long out of date. Since the 2.0 firmware upgrade, iPhones have full push ability with MS Exchange, and in fact communicate directly with Exchange rather than by BES, which Blackbery must use.

Word Excel and pdf can all be viewed too, although not edited. Maybe a drawback on the road, but no-one uses their phone for intensive document production I would guess!

I guess touch-screen typing is an acquired taste, but i find it almost as quick as conventional keyboard - the autocorrect is very clever and deals with most mistypes.

Having used both I think Blackberrys are marginally better on email and calendaring, but when they're so awful at web-browsing I would go for the iPhone every time. And Windows and Symbian platforms are in awful need of either a total overhaul or putting down. IMHO.