Going Mobile - Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web - page 315

that I could never list them all. To ind more of these services, try doing a
Google search for wireless alert and then type in the keyword in which
you're interested. So you might enter wireless alert stocks , or wireless
alert legal . It takes a little siting, but there are probably hundreds of sin-
gle-site wireless alert services out there.
As you'll see momentarily, your phone is not limited to receiving SMS
alerts—you can oten send e-mail messages to your phone as well. However,
when there are SMS alert services available for the topic in which you're
interested, you should use those instead of sending e-mails to your phone.
Why? Because alert services are formatted to your phone. hey're short,
they're free of HTML and multimedia, and they're easy to read. Regular
e-mails, even ones that are fairly short, can be tough to read on mobile
phones. Even on a phone that's got an easily readable, large screen, like a
BlackBerry, a regular e-mail can look like hash.
But sometimes regular e-mail messages are the only way you can get the
information you want to monitor, so let's discuss how to do that.
Filtering to your phone
In the last chapter, we looked at GMail and how to ilter your e-mail. To get
information to your phone, there's just one more step you have to take—set
up ilters to go to your phone's e-mail address, which you hopefully discov-
ered earlier in this chapter.
If you have an older phone that only does text messages and doesn't do
browsing, make sure that the mail you're getting to your phone contains
information that you can use independently of the Web. An alert that con-
tains only a pointer to a Web page, for example, isn't going to be very use-
ful. A page monitor alert that contains the text of the changed page, on the
other hand, can be useful, as long as it contains a limited amount of text and
doesn't overload your phone.
I'm sorry I can't be more speciic! here are many phone models out there.
Basically, the more recent your phone, the more you'll be able to do. But even
older phones, with their SMS receiving capabilities, can do some things.
While mobile phones can't do everything a desktop or laptop computer can do,
they sure try! For phones, primarily, there's e-mail and then there's browsing.