Stay Productive With Mobile Services

Using your smart phone, you can share documents on your office PC with others; view Outlook calendar entries, contacts, and e-mail; and search your computer's hard drive. And you can make Skype calls from your mobile device, too--even if your smart phone doesn't support the Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service.

A reality check: Remotely accessing your computer's hard drive, especially with a smart phone (which lacks the high-powered processor of a PC), can be sluggish.

Intuit's newQuicken Onlineis a $3-per-month service that lets you enter expenditures and track budgets and expenses from any computer or mobile Web browser. Though the service has been optimized for the Apple iPhone Safari browser, the same is not yet true for other mobile Web browsers. (Sites optimized for mobile browsers tend to draw and refresh more quickly and look better when viewed on small screens.)

With Quicken Online, you can aggregate and categorize all your online account transactions; create charts showing income and expenses; and add, delete, and edit categories. Quicken Online may be attractive to sole proprietors for tracking business-travel expenses for tax purposes, as the service can export data to Intuit's TurboTax software. The service is not designed for companies needing QuickBooks or other, more-robust business tools, however.

Keep Tabs on Your Time

Hourly-rate professionals need an easy way to track their time, especially when they're visiting clients or performing other tasks away from their computers. A free service calledmyHours.comprovides time-tracking tools, for individuals and companies, that are accessible on any computer via a Web browser. You can define clients, projects, and tasks; set an hourly rate; generate reports; and export them to Excel.

myHours Mobile, a new addition to the service, is currently in public beta. You can log in to the service from any mobile browser, and then start and stop the clock on a project and tasks. (But before you can do that, you must first define those projects and tasks using the full-blown myHours.com service in a PC browser.)

The myHours.com service is fairly basic: You can't generate invoices based on your hours tracked, for example. And the company's Web site indicates that it will eventually charge for its services (though it doesn't indicate when). But for simple time tracking, myHours.com and its mobile component may be all you need.

As any traveler knows all too well, flights can be delayed or even cancelled at a moment's notice. MobiMate'sWorldMate Live, a $10-per-month service for BlackBerry users launched last fall, is designed to help travelers navigate around such unexpected twists.

Before your trip, enter the details of your itinerary into WorldMate Live's Web site. Another option is to download MobiMate's Outlook add-on program, which lets you export confirmation e-mail messages relevant to your trip into the WorldMate Live site. Once your itinerary is set, you'll automatically receive alerts and updates relevant to the itinerary on your BlackBerry.

In our tests, WorldMate Live worked well. The service, recently upgraded, now offers useful new features such as better integration between the itinerary manager and BlackBerry Maps.

WorldMate Live provides lots of other travel tools--weather reports, a currency converter, world clocks--that are also found in the WorldMate Professional software/service for other mobile OSs. Free versions of WorldMate are available for most smart phones (except Palm OS devices), but they don't include the paid version's travel alerts or satellite weather images.