Stay Productive With Mobile Services

Another option is Orbitz'sTraveler Update, which gives you an at-a-glance view of your flight status, current security wait times, local traffic, weather, and other information for U.S. airports. The free service combines user-generated content with information from the FAA and other authorities. You can also receive text-message alerts regarding flight status and use the service on a mobile or desktop Web browser.

Apple's iPhone made headlines last year for, among other things, offering Visual Voicemail--the ability to view a list of voice-mail messages and select only those you need to hear now. TheGotVoiceservice aims to do the same for various devices.

GotVoice is available in three versions: the free ad-supported Lite, which converts audio messages into MP3s accessible only from the GotVoice Web site; Premium ($10 monthly), which forwards your voice mail as MP3 files attached to e-mail and also transcribes voice mail into text; and Professional (available at various rates), designed for small-business needs.

Having voice mail you've received on multiple phones--including your cell phone--forwarded as e-mail to your smart phone is extremely convenient. GotVoice also lets you simultaneously broadcast a brief voice message to multiple phone numbers, a quick way to alert colleagues about an urgent business matter.

The Premium and Professional plans automatically check your voice mail every 30 minutes and then forward those messages, according to the service's creators. Butin one of our tests, GotVoice took nearly 12 hours to forward an e-mail with a transcription and MP3 attachment.

Other voice mail messages in our tests were forwarded much more quickly, however. Also, it's worth noting that subscribers of AT&T, Verizon, and other cell-phone service providers can have unanswered calls immediately forwarded to GotVoice; this feature will eliminate the need to wait every 30 minutes for GotVoice to retrieve messages, according to a GotVoice spokesperson. If you decide to use the service, keep in mind that each forwarded call will eat into your voice-plan minutes.

Waiting for your laptop to boot up, just to determine if a Wi-Fi network is nearby, is no one's idea of efficiency. A better option: Use your cell phone to search for nearby hotspots.

To use the freeJiWire Hotspot Finder for Cell Phonesservice, type in your mobile browser. In the Search field, type and the location (you can use zip and area codes).

The search results will include the hotspot location's name (such as Starbucks), its street address, and whether the Wi-Fi access is free. You then click the Directions To link to get driving directions to the hot spot. You can also have information on Wi-Fi network locations sent to you as SMS messages. The JiWire service is fairly basic: You can't search specifically for Wi-Fi networks at a particular airport, for one thing. But it beats firing up a laptop.

Contributing Editor James A. Martin writes theMobile Computingcolumn for PCWorld.com.