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Monday, June 9, 2008

Cheapest unlimited wireless broadband.. and what you could do with it

I've had my Palm Treo 750 for a good 3 months now but have only recently experienced real push-mail when I signed up for the unlimited data package from celcom for an unbelievable rm20/mth. Yes you read it right, I couldn't believe it myself when I walked into the nearest TM Point shop and asked about the various packages and they told me about this Streamyx + wireless broadband for RM108/mth.

As I already had a Streamyx 1MBps service I signed up and committed an extra rm20/mth to get the wireless broadband service at 3G speeds. Despite my initial hesitation about signing up to celcom, any doubts I had soon disappeared when the top of my screen showed the "3G" icon and sometimes even the "H" icon for HSDPA or 3.5G. Was it fast? Yes very. Reliable? Well more often than not it was. The odd few times I would have to retry to connect. But overall I'm a happy camper. But a word of warning though, it does not come with voice, only data. No problems using my phone as a modem which had very reasonable download speeds.

With that signed up I looked around for push email services and stumbled upon mail2web which has a free subscription for accounts ending with "@mail2web.com". The beauty of this service is it has a microsoft exchange server which means push mail capabilities on your device. I decided to forward my other email accounts to this address to take advantage of the push capability and found it to be extremely reliable and having very little lag if at all between the time the mail reached my actual email account and the time it was forwarded to my mail2web account. Try it and you would not be disappointed.

My only regret about my PDA phone? battery life.. With an always on data connection, the Treo 750 couldn't last the day. A setting of a pull every 15 minutes is what I'm living with for now, until I find a solution to the battery life.

Thats about all the joy I have for today.