I had never realised quite how annoying it was not being able to read HTML emails on the Blackberry until I found out there was a piece of software that would allow you to do it – Empower HTML Email Viewer.  Ah ha! I thought to myself, that is just what I need. I have about 4 email accounts coming through my Blackberry and a couple of them are web ones like Hotmail. At the moment, these web mails are generally unreadable unless they are a simple conversational exchange between myself and a friend/colleague. I just ignore them and go check them out once online again. Then I found out about Empower HTML viewer and this review said it was great and just what I needed. So I got it.

It does display the emails in a way that is clearer to read. Any text, instead of being shown as a series of links now shows as text. That is definitely a step forward. I thought at first that the images weren’t displayed – but realised it just takes a while to load them. So now, in my "Amazon Recommends" text, I can see what Amazon recommends by title and see the mini pictures too. It costs $29.99 at full price. I know the exchange rate is great for the UK at the moment (sorry peeps!) but even at £15 that is pretty steep in my books for something that just makes your emails look a little different.

Empower HTML Email Viewer Pro also has this feature that allows you to set the background theme of your email based on which account it comes from. I thought this is a  pretty neat idea – as I said, I have 4 email accounts coming in and it would be nice to easily distinguish between them. The thing is, I don’t think it works because of one of the fundamental design features of the Blackberry (in the UK anyway). All email that you receive comes through a redirector that is set up based on your network – in my case O2. So all emails effectively come from an o2email.co.uk address no matter where they start. I think this means that I always end up with the same theme! I need to test it more to validate my theory, but going through the mails from the different sources in my Inbox, this seems to be the case so far.

I do believe that this is a feature that Blackberry’s should carry as standard – and who knows, maybe in the next generation of devices it will be built in. Meanwhile, for those of us with an existing device it provides a good solution to a frustrating problem – albeit a very expensive solution.

Empower HTML Email Viewer Pro is available at www.getempower.com/ – and at the JAMM Store at $29.99.

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