Accessing e-mail from a mobile phone is no longer just for corporate bigwigs. New services are arriving that make it easier and more affordable for everyone, from soccer moms to college students.

On Thanksgiving Day, a start-up called Berggi will launch a service that is intended to make accessing e-mail and sending instant messages easier on low-cost mobile phones.

Babur Ozden, chief executive of Berggi, said the service aggregates all personal e-mail and instant messaging clients into a single interface, for simpler access. And the service can be used on just about any handset, offering a less expensive alternative to corporate-based e-mail services from companies such as Research In Motion, maker of the BlackBerry handheld messaging device.

Berggi isn’t the first company to promise easy access to e-mail on cell phones. Mobile operators have been integrating mobile e-mail and IM clients into their phones for more than a year. And access to mobile e-mail Web sites, such as those offered by Google and Yahoo, has also been available through a mobile WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) browser that offers stripped-down versions of the sites, specially designed for mobile phones.

Experts say that two things have limited the adoption of mobile e-mail: ease of use, and price. Most consumers don’t even realize they can access e-mail on their phones. Anyone with a WAP browser on their phone, which is pretty much anyone who has bought a new phone in the past two years, could access personal e-mail from a WAP-enabled site such as Google, Yahoo or Hotmail. But accessing e-mail this way is cumbersome and requires users to type a mobile address and click through several menus to access the e-mail service.

So far, the functionality, which has been available for a little more a year, has been limited to certain handsets. But more handsets are being added.

(cnet.com)