Funambol for BlackBerry-like capabilities on cheap handsets
The Funambol core project is a free and open source mobile synchronization server that provides push email, address book and calendar (PIM) data synchronization, and device management for wireless devices, leveraging standard protocols such as SyncML (as defined by Wikipedia). Using Funambol, we can have a BlackBerry-like features on cheap handsets which have at least J2ME and GPRS capabilities (well, almost all of them have this feature now).
Image via Wikipedia
We can use Funambol to synchronize our email, address book, and calendar data from many kind of mobile devices (Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, Palm, iPod, iPhone, and any J2ME capable devices) and popular services on the web like Gmail, Facebook, MSN, and Yahoo, and even desktop applications like Ms Outlook, Thunderbird, and Lotus Notes.
It means that we can read, compose, and reply/forward emails from our mobile device with the same account as our GMail or Yahoo Mail. Using it’s push email technology, we can be notified by our cheap mobile phone when someone send us an email on our Gmail account. We can add a task or schedule a meeting on calendar using Outlook then we can see them on a cheap K320i Sony Ericsson mobile phone as well as on Gmail Task. Our contact address books will also be synchronized between all devices, services, and application that we use, meaning that our phone address book will be the same as our Yahoo, Outlook, or Gmail Contacts database. This is a very good solution for backing up valuable contact database especially for those who always lost his mobile phone easily (like me ;)).
Companies with large number of mobile employees and very tight schedule will take advantage by installing it’s own internal Funambol server, as the employees will be reminded always with it’s task and schedule as well as keep in contact with the headquarters using push email technologies. This can be achieved using the employees’ handsets that they already have.
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