Sprint announced today that they would invest up to $3 billion to setup WiMax highspeed internet access to 100 million customers by the end of 2008.  Sprint is choosing Motorola, Intel, and Samsung to supply this equipment despite its cellular agreement with Qualcomm, which provides the network equipment to provide fast access through cellular infrastructure (3G).  Sprint is billing the WiMax technology as 4G and is hoping to catch up according to MarketWatch by outflanking Verizon Wireless and Cingular.

WiMax could not only allow customers to access their cellular calls, but internet, wireless handheld VOIP phones and many other products converging together with WiFi cards (which would need a WiMax card upgrade).

Their vision would be one where a user did not need a cable wire to their house to run a modem and wireless router, instead all devices would log into the greater wireless WiMax network.  Downside might be in how much consumers have to pay for individual hardware access.  A router today offers consumers somewhat of a non-itemized ride for their extra computers, handhelds, cameras, TiVo’s and refrigerators that run off the wireless network in the house.

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Emoze will push email to your cellular device and synchronize contacts and appointments (free of charge), much the way email and Outlook information is pushed to a blackberry. Most non-blackberry devices rely on a pull of information. This means that the mobile device is programmed to log on and grab email or other information at programmed intervals which might be every 15 minutes, 30 minutes, hour or more, and there may be dark periods where the device does not pull information while you sleep.

A push service sends the email to your device in real time as it comes in. This means you get email faster and don’t miss anything important. It also means that your mobile smart phone will not waste energy or battery life to login and connect only to find an empty inbox.

Emoze also provides more information on how their technology works on their own website.

The service is free(not sure if I mentioned that this was free! No $5-10k required for a special Blackberry server to sit beside an exchange server) and only requires an email account. It will work with Yahoo Mail (POP3) or Gmail(POP3). It will work with Outlook as well utilizing the following mail servers:
* Microsoft Exchange 5.5, 2000, 2003
* POP3
* Novell Groupwise (with Outlook XP/2003)
* Lotus Domino (coming soon)

Emoze will work with a number of devices but they do not support my Treo 600 yet. (I’m anticipating their coming update soon!
Emoze currently supports the following operating systems on mobile devices.

* Microsoft Mobile 2002, 2003, 5.0
* Symbian Series 60
* Symbian UIQ (coming soon)
* Microsoft Smartphone (coming soon)
* Palm (coming soon)

Emoze does support AES-128 bit encryption, authentication and symmetrical keys. They promise that data is never transmitted in an unencrypted format over the network.

Emoze Ltd. is based in Israel and part of the Emblaze Group.

Emoze Beta Download is available here! (A quick registration is required)

www.emoze.com

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Sony has put together an interesting convergence driven device in the Sony MyLo.  Its a 1GB flash drive handheld device with Wi-Fi (not cellular) capability.  It can play MP3 and WMA files, and it can stream files to other devices within its local area (stream to play not stream to copy).  Then it has a built in keyboard with the ability to text over the WiFi connection or use Skype to make phone calls.  It was just released to the public a few hours ago and sony website for the product wasn’t live as this article was written, but check out the video from Gizmodo.

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