Ashamed to pull your phone out in a gathering? If you have a phone that would be hidden in the darkest corner of a museum of phone-snobs, all is not lost yet. Thanks to Indian entrepreneurs ‘Jaamun,' you can now whip out that museum piece and check email on it. Oh yes, and without those GPRS charges too.
‘Jaamun's tagline is “email on any mobile,” and this simple service is what they are providing — for the simplest of phones.
‘Jaamun' is a venture by IIT Delhi alumni Pratiroop Mehta and Mayank Kumar. Mr. Mehta was previously working for the new product development team at Reliance, while Mr. Kumar was part of the enterprise software division at Microsoft India.
They started out building a mobile email client, but found that a lot of users have phones that do not support GPRS. The solution, they found, would be to leave GPRS out of it.
“Any IMAP/POP supporting email server can be configured via ‘Jaamun.' And you can sign up online or by sending an SMS with the email ID and password to 9773467755. Once you map the mail ID and Twitter handle to the mobile number, you are ready to receive, reply, forward and compose mails on your basic phone,” Mr. Mehta says.
For Facebook and Orkut, the integration is a little different — you will first have to sign up for Gmail updates for both these social networking sites.
When you sign up online at >http://www.jaamun.in , you get a free trial plan of 50 messages for a month, and you can subscribe to the service after the trial period expires.
Apart from paying for the SMS (when you send mails), there are various subscription packages available for the service.
Going by the site, it could range from Rs.49 to Rs. 75 a month. Push mail service over GPRS is obviously on the higher side.
The advantage with ‘Jaamun' is that it can work on any mobile and any network, the creators say — there is no need for either GPRS or for installing an application on the phone. As far as the service goes, there is smart message extraction, compression, auto spam filters and attachment alerts.
“On our site, we've made it very clear that we ensure the password and everything is secure. The connection as we link to your email is also secure,” Mr. Mehta says.
So if you are not ready to get rid of that decadent phone yet, here, finally, is a way you can redeem yourself.
