So, recently cut loose from a corporate Outlook / Exchange world, I struck out through the wastelands to find a new home base from which to operate.  It needs to work seamlessly from:

• My main PC
• My current and any near term mobile phone / PDA (currently a Treo 7oow) 
• My secondary PC which is attached to my 65? plasma in the great room where I both surf, game and even work from time to time 
• Though I’m a security / paranoid Internet user, I’d also like to be able to use it from my wife’s, my parent’s or other friend’s PCs
• Work with, but not require Outlook

Of course there are a lot of the usual suspects and some new players that could serve, but I really only considered three contenders:  Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.  I have accounts on all three under the name Hahleq and since I was going to be using that as my main working name, no problems there.

However, I’ve never been a fan of Yahoo as a portal or really for anything, for that matter, though that is where most of my IM friends reside.  I always found their interface too cluttered, cutesy, ad-ridden and consequently a site to be avoided.  Needless to say, they fell away from the table very quickly.
That left Google and Microsoft.  Over the next couple of days, I’m going to post about various components of my experimentation with both and how they each fared.  Of course, I’ll also reveal where I landed.

Originally posted March 4, 2008