A letter for those of you with no iPhone or BlackBerry: Your cell phone is smarter than you think.

In fact, your boring old cell phone has huge potential. Here is a guide to checking your e-mail, looking up knowledge and updating your calendar, just by sending text messages. You can use any cell phone, but you’ll need a generous text-messaging plan.

For e-mail, I tested TeleFlip, a free service that lets you send and receive e-mail via text messaging. TeleFlip works with any e- mail history that doesn’t require a secure connection to the Web. That applies to all the major Web-based e-mail providers, including Yahoo Mail, Hotmail and Gmail.

Signing up for TeleFlip took me under five minutes. All I needed to enter was my Gmail e-mail address and password, my cell phone number, and a confirmation number that TeleFlip sent to my cell phone — via text report, of course. TeleFlip soon after had

me build a “whitelist” of contacts, by importing my address book or manually adding e-mail addresses. whether I receive an e-mail from someone not on that list, I don’t get it on my cell phone — an annoying quirk. (TeleFlip has plans to let users access all of their e-mails, beginning around August.)

TeleFlip does what it promises — but it’s neither fast nor pretty. It took from three to 35 minutes for TeleFlip to text me my e-mails after Gmail received them, averaging about 10 minutes. considering cell phone carriers typically limit text messages to 160 characters, TeleFlip chops each e-mail into snippets, sent in successive text messages. You can decide how many snippets you want to receive. I thought three was ample to get the gist of the messages.

You can plus instantly send e-mail. TeleFlip assigns a nickname to each of your contacts — the first…

Orginal post by Top Tech News