Technofile: Getting e-mail while on the move is not only useful it's becoming increasingly popular. But it can still be fraught with difficulties. So why not get a phone that is built for the job?

Canadian firm Research In Motion caused a flurry of interest right from the start of this century with its Blackberry device.

Although bulky and with a screen in black and white, the device, which could only send and receive e-mail and not place voice calls, was an instant hit for two simple reasons. It automatically downloaded e-mail at regular intervals, and synchronised replies and deletions with your desktop PC, halving your e-mail workload. Suddenly, business-critical e-mail was truly possible.

However, the Blackberry, which was soon dubbed the "Crackberry" because of its addictive qualities, has become a poor cousin to the average mobile phone, which has shot ahead in features - adding cameras and now music to its line-up. Moreover, fully-featured PDAs have morphed into phones, while even adding wireless internet access.

So the latest incarnations of the Blackberry have a lot to live up to. One of the most recent is the Blackberry 7100t, currently being marketed by T-Mobile.

At 11.94cm (4.7 inches) by 5.84cm (2.3in) by 1.78cm (0.7in), it is smaller than previous Blackberry models, apparently to take the fight back to the average mobile phone. But it's still on the PDA side of the fence size-wise.

The difference in size has come with the shift to the new hybrid keyboard design. This ditches the full keyboard in favour of 20 buttons, where most keys have two letters taken from the QWERTY layout (QW, ER, TY etc) and one number.

This means having to use predictive text to type e-mails. But RIM's "SureType" software makes light work of this and the new keyboard still reduces the number of keystrokes compared to a normal mobile.

It's also the first Blackberry to feature Bluetooth - meaning a headset can be used for voice calls. Other features include: a speaker phone; quad band GSM; a 240 by 260 colour screen; instant messaging services and a web browser. The "killer" feature of Blackberry remain, however: e-mail which arrives as if by magic. Blackberries achieve this by downloading e-mail every 15 minutes and keeping at bay large attachments. It is also compatible with enterprise servers such as Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes.

However, while the 7100t is a great entry-level device for Blackberry fans, the build quality remains very North American. If you have ever driven an American car, with its characteristic plastic fascia and dull design, and then switched to a European or Japanese car, you'll know where I'm coming from.

Whatever RIM's issues, however, it's clear people want e-mail on the move.

A new survey of the UK market has found that 16 million UK consumers want mobile e-mail and 84 per cent only want to download e-mails which will be relevant to them while mobile.

Critical Path, a large US messaging firm, found over 60 per cent also want mobile e-mail to be affordable. Hence, a massive 96 per cent of consumers are not willing to buy an expensive mobile phone just to get mobile e-mail.

The survey also found that 88 per cent of respondents will still check their e-mail for messages from family and friends while on holiday.

So, in the interests of democratising mobile e-mail, you might like to try this out: find out if your normal e-mail address is a POP account. Then check you mobile phone will do POP e-mail as well.

Assuming both do, then add your normal username and password to the phone's e-mail application.

Having done this, there's just one last thing to turn your phone into a "Blackberry on the cheap". Limit the phone to downloading just the first 5k of each message. That will keep the huge attachments at bay and allow you to see the first few important lines of the message.

Anything that's really important you can simply call the sender or download the full e-mail message.

For the full Blackberry experience, proceed to obsessively check your email every five minutes, thereby ruining your holiday and throwing your marriage into chaos. Happy mobile e-mailing.