Download Squad

Like the idea of having access to email, traffic, weather, and news information on the go, but don't feel like spending the extra money on a data plan for your cellphone? 800PBX launched a new service that lets anyone access web content on their cellphone without a web browser or a data plan.

It's called 800 Genie, and here's how it works. You call a phone number on your cellphone and 800 Genie will use screen reading technology to read you the content of web pages and ask you for voice prompts to perform additional options. For example if you want to check your email, 800 Genie can read you a list of new messages and ask if you'd like to hear or reply to a message.

The service looks promising. But we're a little turned off at the beta website. First of all, there's a nice big button asking users to sign up for the free service. But when you click on the signup button you're asked for a invitation code. There's not even a box for requesting invitations. And there's also a nice big message at the bottom of the screen asking visitors to call 877-MY-800GENIE for more information. So we dutifully placed a call only to receive a message letting us know that the service is in private beta and therefore inaccessible.

We figured we'd save you the pain of repeating the experiment, so have a listen for yourself. Fortunately we also found a demo of the service and we've tacked that on as well.


As you can hear the process of checking your email over the phone in this fashion can be rather tedious. But if you're going to be away from your computer for a long time but can't stand to be without email access, 800 Genie does look promising. If you ever get a chance to sign up.