Unfortunately, a Blackberry service is not cheap. And the handsets themselves are quite pricey compared to standard mobile phones. These restrictions have made Blackberry a tool for those people with a lot of extra cash to spend on their monthly phone bills, and not for the rest of the world who are not so lucky.

Well, at least until now..

Nowadays, most middle-end mobile phones has their own built in email application that you can use to read and send your emails on the go.

However, there are some big drawbacks in using the standard mobile phone email application that downloads your emails from your email server to your mobile phone, which are:

- Mobile internet connection fee is more expensive compared to your regular home/office internet connection. If you typically receive several hundreds of kilobytes to several megabytes worth of emails in your inbox daily, than downloading all your emails to your mobile phone means emptying your wallet - fast.

- The processing capability and memory capacity of mobile phones are limited. Usually a native mobile phone email applications will be able to store only until 100 or so emails. If the number of stored emails is bigger than that, the performance will become irritatingly slow and almost impossible to use.

Then, how can you achieve email performance that is better than Blackberry (as the title of this article mentions)? it's simply a matter of choosing the right free (yes, free) java email application for your mobile phone which offers the right kind of free service (yes, again.. free service) to store and manage your emails.

It's actually quite easy to turn your mobile phone into a phone that is capable of very powerful mobile email functionalities such as:

- Checking your emails and sending them while on the move.

- Archiving of gigabytes worth of emails. You can do this even from an old cracked phone like my Motorola Razr V3.

- Search through your gigantic email database within seconds. Looking for an old email from your old friend Sam? Now you can do it from your mobile phone within seconds.

- Having an advanced spam filter right in your mobile phone. Spams will go where they belong, in the trash bin, without you ever needing to sort them out manually

- Very efficient bandwidth usage. Imagine forwarding an email you receive with 8 MB attachment to a coleague or friend using only several kilobytes worth of your mobile data plan. Impossible? think again.. you'll love it when you try it.

Believe it or not, all these features can be added to your mobile phone for free, provided that it support java and already have a mobile data/internet plan active.

Interested? Here's basically how you can do it:

1. Install an email java application for mobile phone that can retrieve POP3 emails from your mail server. Do a search on google for "java mobile phone email application" and you'll get a lot of programs that can do this for free. Remember the rule I mention above that the application has to provide the right kind of service? From all the java applications you find in this step, choose only the application that stores all your emails in its own server, not in your mobile phone. This will enable you to search through gigabytes of email archive within seconds (now that's what I call mobile email power!).

2. Setup your email client in your office/home computer to leave messages on mail server after emails have been downloaded

3. Set your email client in your office/home computer to delete messages from mail server only after 5 days

Some note: email client means the email program you're using on your home/office computer to read and send emails. It can be Microsoft Outlook/Outlook Express, Eudora, The Bat, etc.

Well.. basically that's it! That's what you have to do to be able to read your home/office email while on the go, on your mobile phone.

Remember, the most important thing is step 1. You must choose a mobile java application that stores the emails in its server.