What Is The Best Free Service?

[Jon Westfall]

Many moons ago I decided to try almost every free service I could get my greedy little geek hands on. It is for this reason that my eWallet overflows with Usernames & Passwords to services that do everything from deliver news emails to give me remote access to my machines. I'm sure I'm not alone in this - and that many of you have your favorite free service that you religiously use. The goal of this thread is to share these services and give others some great time-wasting activities for today (After all, ya gotta try them all )

So what is YOUR favorite free service? What makes it so great? How often do you use it? As for mine.... I suppose I'll tell you if you read on

CallWave is an interesting company in their offerings. One of the best services they have is known as CallWave For Your Cell Phone (A subset of CallWave Mobile). This free service (With an optional $3.99/mo upgrade that I haven't had need for yet) was posted on our frontpage a number of months back, and I enthusiastically signed up that day. If you're not familiar with it, it is a voicemail service that replaces the voicemail your wireless provider gives you. It adds a number of features, including


* Voicemails & Missed Call Notices (With Caller ID) sent to your email.
* Option to transfer call to landline
* Option to listen to your callers as they are leaving a voicemail and optionally interrupt and answer the call. This feature alone has freaked out many a friend whose call I just missed.

For free, they give your callers the option to leave up to a 1 minute message (In practice, anyone who leaves longer than a 1 minute voicemail deserves to be hung up on in most cases!), and you can interrupt and talk to the person for up to 20 minutes on Callwave's dime (Certainly enough time to tell them to call you back, or to call them back!). For the $3.99 upgrade, your callers can leave 3 minute messages and you can talk to them for an unlimited time. As I said, I haven't had need for the upgrade yet, but it's nice to know it's there. CallWave also allows you to assign nicknames to people's phone numbers, so my alerts (Which can be configured to go to Email or SMS or both) can say "Mom called and did not leave a message" vs "44x-3xx-9xxx called and did not leave a message". Quite a nice touch.

Now that I've shared with you, it's only fair you share with me - what free service do you love. There are others in my list of favorites, see if you can guess the others or (better yet) give me one that I haven't used yet!

[Jon Westfall]

Many moons ago I decided to try almost every free service I could get my greedy little geek hands on. It is for this reason that my eWallet overflows with Usernames & Passwords to services that do everything from deliver news emails to give me remote access to my machines. I'm sure I'm not alone in this - and that many of you have your favorite free service that you religiously use. The goal of this thread is to share these services and give others some great time-wasting activities for today (After all, ya gotta try them all )

So what is YOUR favorite free service? What makes it so great? How often do you use it? As for mine.... I suppose I'll tell you if you read on

CallWave is an interesting company in their offerings. One of the best services they have is known as CallWave For Your Cell Phone (A subset of CallWave Mobile). This free service (With an optional $3.99/mo upgrade that I haven't had need for yet) was posted on our frontpage a number of months back, and I enthusiastically signed up that day. If you're not familiar with it, it is a voicemail service that replaces the voicemail your wireless provider gives you. It adds a number of features, including


* Voicemails & Missed Call Notices (With Caller ID) sent to your email.
* Option to transfer call to landline
* Option to listen to your callers as they are leaving a voicemail and optionally interrupt and answer the call. This feature alone has freaked out many a friend whose call I just missed.

For free, they give your callers the option to leave up to a 1 minute message (In practice, anyone who leaves longer than a 1 minute voicemail deserves to be hung up on in most cases!), and you can interrupt and talk to the person for up to 20 minutes on Callwave's dime (Certainly enough time to tell them to call you back, or to call them back!). For the $3.99 upgrade, your callers can leave 3 minute messages and you can talk to them for an unlimited time. As I said, I haven't had need for the upgrade yet, but it's nice to know it's there. CallWave also allows you to assign nicknames to people's phone numbers, so my alerts (Which can be configured to go to Email or SMS or both) can say "Mom called and did not leave a message" vs "44x-3xx-9xxx called and did not leave a message". Quite a nice touch.

Now that I've shared with you, it's only fair you share with me - what free service do you love. There are others in my list of favorites, see if you can guess the others or (better yet) give me one that I haven't used yet!

[CTSLICK]

Does Skweezer count as a service? I use Skweezer all the time when bashing around the internet on my PDA (tethered cell phone connection). It does a pretty good job of "mobilizing" sites and helps speed up browsing overall. Things like personalized bookmarks and pop mail checker are nice too. The free version is ad supported but its not intrusive enough to bother me.

[Vincent M Ferrari]

Bloglines.

I have been a blogger for about 4 years, and I read quite a few blogs and news sites. The best part of Bloglines is that it keeps my RSS together from device to device. Wherever I go, there are my feeds, and they have a great mobile version that works on every mobile device I've ever tried it on. The fact that I don't have to remember what feeds I added to what device makes it a must-have service and I highly recommend it to anyone suffering blog or news overload.

[servoisgod]

ORB!!! http://www.orb.com. Probably the best and easiest home media access that I've ever used. And yes...FREE!

[paqguy]

Logmein.com - FREE remote access to your computer. Very similar to GoTOMYPC but free. Love it - especially nice for helping friends and family. I have them all load a small client on their machines and i can connect anytime i need to.

I also use AVVENU and FolderShare for accessing my files remotely. Avvenu works nicely on my Treo!

[Darren Behan]

I second logmein.

Very useful and my job hasn't blocked it yet 8)

db

[pivaska]

Skype with video. I call South Africa at lest 4 times a week because of an affiliation with a not for profit organizaiton and we talk about 45 minutes each time. I save hundreds of dollars in phone bills.

[Vincent M Ferrari]

Are you using Skype on your Pocket PC? If so, since you have the same one I do, do you have to overclock it to run? I'm curious to know how well it works for you.

[pivaska]

Yes I have skpy on my PDA. I don't use it all that much but when I do I do not have to overclock it. I have comcast at home with a 6meg line and I have comcast business at work with a 10meg line. Needless to say it is still 801b. I have also used the I have only experienced problems when there were problems as well with my pc connection and the call might get dropped but it hasn't happened for quite a while now. The worst thing is having to use the pda upside down like a phone. I haven't heard of a good BT headset that is small and yet works like it should. I sometimes use the Socket CF ethernet card when I want more stability instead of wireless.

[jhat3k1]

This is BS, they list sprint as a carrier choice but after you fill out everything they tell you sprint is not supported. This would be a great service.