About 4SmartPhone
As the name implies, 4SmartPhone is a system for synchronizing your Outlook data with your mobile device. Your Outlook data gets stored in a mailbox on the 4SmartPhone hosted Exchange server. From there, it is synchronized with your mobile device using whichever synchronization technology is supported by your device and your wireless service provider.

If you have a primary mail account that you want to keep, you can configure 4SmartPhone to work with that account to both send and receive mail using the same email address you have been using. There's no need to go through the grief of changing email addresses to take advantage of the 4SmartPhone service.

Best of all, you can connect to your 4SmartPhone hosted Exchange mailbox with the copy of Outlook on your desk. And the one on your notebook PC. And any other copy of Outlook you happen to be running. 4SmartPhone even provides you with a free downloadable copy of Outlook 2003 when you sign up for their service.

The service plans are reasonably priced too. At the time of this writing, the Professional plan is $6.99 per mailbox per month and the Enterprise plan is $9.99 per mailbox per month (with a $50 setup fee). You pay for both plans up front a year at a time, which works out to $83.88 for the Professional plan and $119.88 for the Enterprise plan.

The offering from other hosted Exchange service providers differ somewhat, but this gives you an idea.

Living with a hosted Exchange mailbox
I have been using my 4SmartPhone-hosted Exchange mailbox for almost a year now. I love the fact that I no longer have to worry about my Outlook data getting out of sync from device to device. And I love the fact that someone else is backing up my Outlook data for me. I can't imagine going back to a non-hosted mailbox.

That said, hosted Exchange mailboxes are not perfect. You of course have to pay for them, although with a service like 4SmartPhone it is really easy to justify that cost.

A cluster of issues is related to the fact that your Exchange mailbox, and therefore your Outlook data, is stored on someone else's servers, which are located, well, somewhere else:

• Because your data is on someone else's servers, you don't have complete control over it, which might bother you.
• Because you get access to your mailbox over the Internet, if your Internet connection is down, you can't connect to your mailbox until the connection comes back up.
• Because you get access to your mailbox over the Internet, synchronization between Outlook and the mailbox tends to be slower.

And that's about it. In day-to-day use, there's no visible difference, except now you can get at your data from anywhere you have Internet access, and that data is always synchronized no matter what computer or device you use to work with it.

Summary A hosted Exchange mailbox stores your Outlook data on an Exchange server that's operated and maintained by someone, somewhere out there, but connected to your copy of Outlook through the Internet. It's what I think of as an Inbox in the Sky.