iPhone, Palm Pre, Android Phone – wow, those smart phones sure are cool! They also come with a pretty hefty price tag not just to purchase, but to keep the data plan necessary to access all the cool features they offer. I want to connect to my digital world – especially my e-mail and calendar, but you see, I’m cheap – and in this economy cheap is cool. I’ve looked at the iPhone and the Blackberry and I keep thinking the same thing – even if they give the phone to me, the data plans end up costing a fortune over a two year time span.
I have a regular, basic Samsung phone from AT&T with txt messaging (SMS messaging). I pay $9.99 a month for our whole family to have unlimited text messages. For years I’ve just wanted something basic – something to say “hey, you got a new e-mail from Roger” or “Don’t forget you have an appointment at 2:00”. A simple text message to help connect me to my digital life. Unfortunately, nobody seemed to offer that.
That is, until now. I stumbled upon Windows Live Mobile for SMS the other day and I’ve been an addict ever since. Talk about keeping me connected – I think someone over at Microsoft must have been listening to my rants!
If you haven’t yet, go ahead and fire up a browser and head on over to mobile.live.com and take a look around. Here is where the fun starts. It doesn’t take long to get your mobile phone registered and to start exploring.
It Started With E-Mail
Being someone who runs a small business and needs constant access to my e-mail (powered by Live Mail thanks to Live Custom Domains) the first thing I checked out was what type of alerts they had for mail. Sure enough, I found out that my old settings for e-mail was carried over from my “Experiment” last year – the txt msg mystery was solved!
If you have a Live Mail or Hotmail account you are in business – and Microsoft makes sure 
they put you in full control. Not only can you specify when you want the txt msgs delivered (for instance, I don’t want any between 11PM and 7AM) you can also specify under what circumstances you want to be notified through mobile alert filters. For instance, I belong to several mailing lists that I don’t want to be alerted to – so I put in a filter for them to turn off the alerting for those messages. You can setup as many filters as you wish to really give you granular control over how you will get alerted.
So after I got my e-mail alerts fine tuned I wanted to find out how else I could “connect” with my digital life from my “dumb” cell phone. What I discovered next turned me from a fan to a pure enthusiast.
From E-Mail To Full Blown “WOW!”
After getting e-mail alerts setup I started looking around to see what else Live SMS alerts had to offer. That’s when I discovered the full blown list of commands you can send from your phone to Windows Live to get back information in virtually real time. I found out I could even access my calendar and contacts – score!
I recently started to use Live Calendar to keep track of appointments and events and have been very impressed with its abilities. Now that I could query my calendar from anywhere at anytime with my phone and a simple txt msg I was ecstatic! Once you query your calendar for your schedule you can even drill down into it for more details – all with simple txt msgs.
Another cool feature not to be overlooked is the ability to access your contact list on the go. Now I know most of us (including me) keep our contacts on our phone stored in our SIM cards. However, think about this – what happens if you ever lose your phone or your SIM card gets damaged? I learned the hard way that its always good to store your contacts somewhere other than on your phone for long-term storage.
So for example, while I may have my friend Roger’s phone number and e-mail on my phone, perhaps I need his work number or address. Not a problem with Windows Live – it’s right there, at my fingertips!
Finally, as if I wasn’t impressed enough already, I also found out that the SMS alerts can also work with Live Messenger. Now I’m not a big user of Messenger – though I find myself using it more and more each month, but I can see the possibilities here. Say a friend or client wants to get ahold of me, but its not important enough to interrupt with a call. They can just tell Messenger to send me an IM through SMS – to which I can respond back and have my reply delivered as an IM directly to them.
So after all these years of drooling over all these smart phones I have to say that using Windows Live Mobile SMS I’m pretty happy that I didn’t bite the bullet and buy one of those expensive things. I’ve finally found a way to keep my digital life connected with me on the go – and on the cheap!
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