email on the go...

Can anyone offer any advice on the easist way of accessing email on a hand held device?

I use email a lot and really like the idea of a Blackberry type device that notifies you as soon as you get a new mail (as your PC would) rather than going to have to check an fetch new mails. The only other phone features that would be important to me are the abililty to make calls (!), battery life, quad band use and the ability to view email attachments for the majority of "normal" file formats (.txt, word, excel, pdf, jpg, bmp etc.).

Is there anything I need to be aware of?

What's the cheapest way of doing this reliably?

Thanks.

[Steve_P]

I currently do exactly what you are seeking to do with my Nokia N70. I have 3 email accounts setup on the phone via POP3 access. Two of my accounts I have set up to scan for new mail every 2 hours and the 3rd one I have setup so that I have to scan the inbox manually. You can have the phone automatically retreive email upto every 30 minutes if you really wanted. The phone is triband + 3G and includes Quickword, Quicksheet, Quickpoint and Adobe reader, so in terms of attachments you'll be able to handle Word docs, Excel spreadsheets, Powerpoint presentations, Adobe PDF's, jpgs, bmps, gifs, MP4, MP3, wavs, txt etc.

The thing to check is your POP3 email (incoming) account settings and you would use your network provider's SMTP email settings for outgoing email. IF you regularly recieve big attachements, your emailing could become expensive so you need to check what your per MB charges would be. The phone will use packet data on 3G and revert to GPRS if no 3G network is available.

S.