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Now that we can load our cellphones with global positioning systems, shopping services, driving directions, up-to-the-minute airline schedules, weather predictions and the like, it seems the cellphone will soon develop into a new product category: the ultra-ultra-portable computer.

It makes the days of downloading weird and wonderful ring tones seem quaint.

Following are a few of the latest technologies that are making cellphones look more like computers.

SpinVox is a service that translates voicemail to text, rolled out over the past couple of months by Rogers Wireless (and soon from Telus) to BlackBerry devices, PDAs, smartphones or cellphones as SMS messages. SpinVox converts voice messages of up to three minutes in length to text, and sends them to your inbox as an e-mail or SMS. It works in four languages: English, French, German and Spanish.

Users can respond by text or telephone, forward text messages to others or dial in to their voicemail boxes and listen to messages the traditional way.

The SpinVox implementation under review comes from Rogers Wireless, which it integrates with the Rogers voicemail service for $15 a month for an unlimited number of converted messages.

SpinVox is designed for places where phone calls are not possible, such as construction sites, which can drown out conversations, or in theatres, where you must be quiet but still want to get a message instantly.

The marvel of this service is not so much its usefulness as the accuracy of its transcription. It even senses when to put commas and periods into sentences, and has a pretty good notion of capitalization and spelling.

Jott is a similar service, available in the United States and Canada, where it has not been marketed very aggressively. Using a strange combination of high and low technologies, Jott subscribers call a toll-free number and dictate a message a maximum of 30 seconds in length. The odd part of this is that the audio file is then sent to India, where human beings convert the message to text and forward it as an e-mail. The whole process takes about 10 minutes.

A Seattle startup founded by two former Microsoft employees, Jott was conceived as a way to capture thoughts and ideas when people are away from their keyboards. The sophistication of the service comes in the variety of ways one can specify who should receive your message — you can say, when prompted by the mechanical voice on the toll-free number, “myself” or “home” or to a number of people. A feature called JottCast will reach the pre-selected group of people and their e-mail addresses under a single alias, such as “office.”

Jott is a free service at the moment, but is likely to start supporting the service with advertising while offering a premium ad-free service for a monthly fee. In the meantime, the Jott people are polishing speech-recognition software to turn the labour-intensive service into a fully automated one, with faster delivery times.

The popularity of the Blackberry rests on its ability to handle e-mail, but people with older phones without data services can use Meemo, from Toronto-based OceanLake Commerce. A hybrid service (a combination of “push” e-mail and short-message service), it works on all carrier networks. With it, subscribers can read, reply and forward e-mail and even view attachments on phones that can send a receive short messages.

Meemo, says OceanLake, is a “middle-ground” service that operates on more than 95 per cent of devices on the market today; smartphones, which can handle e-mail, amount to just 10 per cent of the 1.2 billion handsets that will be shipped around the world this year, says OcreanLake, leaving a great number of phones incapable of e-mail.

The service costs $5 per month. It does not work with Virgin Mobile phones, and has minor resolvable issues with Hotmail accounts.

Another interesting Canadian product is Poynt, originally called Illumincell, which was a simple service that looked up the Yellow Pages directory for businesses closest to a preset address — the nearest pizzeria, say, or car mechanic — which it does as though you were communicating to someone using the Microsoft instant messenger client on either a cellphone or computer.

Pumped up on steroids by its new owner, Calgary-based Multiplied Media, Poynt has been fleshed out to include a map of the neighbourhood being searched, with “pushpins” locating the results. Hovering the mouse over one will create a pop-up window with more complete results. The company has also added a movie service, which will locate films by theatre, by genre, or by title — when searched by title, all theatres playing the film will be displayed along with a trailer, if one is available.

Another service that has undergone a similar upgrade is Worldmate Live (from MobiMate), a service that runs on the Blackberry and, in the spring, on Windows Mobile platforms. It's a traveller's best friend: It offers clocks for any five cities in the world, four-day weather forecasts, a world map and flight status. Added to the upgraded version is a currency converter with the latest exchange rates, a flight-scheduling service and even an itinerary planner, airfares and booking, as well as layovers and hotels.

One interesting feature is called the Travel Directory, a listing of airports, airlines, hotels, car-rental agencies, international telephone prefixes and North American area codes. There is even a world map that shows where it is day and night for those who get confused about whether it's day or night in Sydney, Australia, when they're in Tashkent, Uzbekistan.

There's also an Outlook Add-In, which pushes travel bulletins to BlackBerry smartphone users, including trip notification, meeting alerts with integrated maps and flight cancellations with suggested alternatives.

The software itself is free, as are the world clock, weather, currency conversion and mapping functions that synchronize in real time with WorldMate's servers.

Those wanting a more powerful assistant, can, for $10 per month or $100 per year, get push-to-phone flight alerts, flight status lookup, a travel directory, and customer support.

This is useful not only for information that would otherwise be hard to get, but also for those people who, for whatever reason, are reluctant to ask for directions. And you know who you are.

One problem with all these services is that subscribers will pay twice for some of the services: first for the service, then for the data transmission fees as dictated by your telco's service plan. What we now need is a cellphone service that will tell us how to avoid the extra costs — especially for Canadian users, who are getting hosed by all these charges.