The Asus Eee and Wireless Email

From Asus Eee News, Mods and Hacks -

ccording to Om Malik, he checks his email on his iPhone-Nokia E61i-Blackberry while in the bathroom, crossing the street and during dinner at a busy restaurant. And he is not alone in his email obsession.

An AOL survey shows that checking email on the portable devices has doubled since 2004. Americans who carry a mobile email device have some really strange addictions:

* 59% are checking email in bed
* 53% in the bathroom
* 37% are checking email while they drive.
* 43% check their email first thing in the morning.
* 40% have checked their email in the middle of the night.
* 83% have checked their email while on vacation.
* An average email user checks mail about five times a day.

With so many users requiring just about 24/7 access to email wherever they are, it is little wonder the global market for wireless email is projected by Palo Alto-based research firm The Radicati Group to grow from US$6 billion in 2007 to nearly US$25 billion in 2011.

To date, the dominant player in wireless email has been RIM, whose Blackberry was the first device to enable users to check their email effortlessly while mobile. Their handsets resemble mobile phones and PDAs and are just as easy to use. However the service is not free and is often bundled with mobile phone service operators' subscriptions.

While the Blackberry supports email attachments, viewing these can be a pain with the limited small screen. Editing, if possible, is even more tedious.

Now here comes the Asus Eee. It is actually small and light enough to toss into large ladies' bags, trendy messenger bags, or students' backpacks. Meaning it is likely to be carried around by users. Well, not exactly the way they would bring a mobile phone along without thinking twice. But at a price point that is actually cheaper than most smartphones, chances are if the user usually totes a bag, the Asus Eee will be inside.

While the Asus Eee, with its projected 15 second boot-up time, does not offer the always-on convenience of the Blackberry, coupled with Wifi, it clearly can be used to do email. So what if I have to wait a few seconds longer to access my email? If I have a few minutes to kill and I have access to free WiFi, the extra seconds won't hurt. Moreover, the Asus Eee might even have a hibernate mode that will reduce the boot-up time even further.

Of course, the Asus Eee obviously does not provide as smooth a user experience for email as the Blackberry does. But it clearly provides a very interesting alternative - and a free one at that. It even allows for more efficient viewing and editing of attachments.

With services like Mobigram and Muztah popping up that offer free international text messaging on mobile phones/handsets via WiFi, 3G and GPRS, suddenly international communications have become extremely affordable - as in free (well assuming the WiFi service used is free). Use the mobile phone to text short messages via Mobigram or Muztah, use the Asus Eee for longer email messages, especially those with attachments. Of course, for some users, the Asus Eee can arguably replace mobile phones, what with its ability to do IM and VoIP. But that's for another post.

Social Networks - the new email for teenagers

According to a CNET article by Stefanie Olsen, teenagers today message each other not by email but via texting and social networks such as MySpace and Facebook. They only use email when communicating professionally or with adults.

While email has remained the choice for corporate communications despite the annoyance of spam, the increasing popularity of IM, VoIP, and text messaging have given rise to alternate services. Of all, social networks appear to be the most potent. With tens of millions of members, the two leading networks, MySpace and Facebook, wield great influence over a generation living online, either through the cell phone or the Internet. And just as IM is being replaced by text messaging, social networks are replacing email for communicating with friends.

More and more, social networks are playing a bigger role on the cell phone. In the last six to nine months, American teens have taken to text messaging in numbers that rival usage in Europe and Asia. According to Jupiter Research, 80% of American teens with cell phones regularly use text messaging.

Still, the age group is a fickle bunch. They're constantly looking for the next, new thing to stay current with friends; and they often use different social networks and tools to keep up with different sets of people. They are often on lots of sites and picking and choosing activities from each one, concerned that if they subscribe to only one social network it would mean losing out on friendships with people who are active in other rival social networks.

The two major social networks don't interoperate, leaving an opportunity for a new social network that could act as an intermediary to aggregate friends in one place much the way Trillian did for IM applications like Yahoo and AOL.