Few people have heard of it, yet many consider John Blankenbaker's KENBAK-1 to be the first commercial personal computer.
Funambol: Open source push email
By James Grahame
Funambol is an open source email app for mobile phones. It supports push email, just like Blackberry Mail. It works on hundreds of phones (including Android, iPhone and Blackberries) and automatically syncs to your computer using a "mobile cloud" address book. The big difference is that you don't have to pay a subscription fee every month.
I use Funambol in conjunction with a Blackberry and a dirt cheap unlimited browsing data plan to save hundreds of dollars per year.
To try Funambol, set up a 90-day trial account on the myFunambol portal. It will prompt you to download an app for your phone (hundreds of handsets are supported) and guides you through the process of syncing your contacts and calendar details.
After the 90-day trial expires, Funambol usually directs you to one of their partners to extend the service.
However, Funambol has offered 10 free unlimited myFunambol accounts to Retro Thing readers [update: they're all gone. Thanks for supporting a worthwhile open source project.]
myFUNAMBOL, the free open source mobile cloud sync demo service
