I stumbled upon a really cool tool that can supercharge any cell phone (or landline for that matter). It lets you use your phone to send emails and text message to individuals or groups; make notes and to-do lists; add entries to your Google Calendar (and many other apps)…but that’s not all…. you also can get news, weather and RSS feeds as well.  And the news gets even better, you won’t need to extend your cell phone contract or go into debt to get it,  because its a free voice recognition service that works with any phone called Jott.

To use it, you register at their website and do some basic setup. You can enter names and email addresses so you can email from your phone; you can setup notes and to-do lists so you can dictate to them from your phone; you can link to your Google calendar so you can add appointments, and you can setup news and weather feeds so you can listen to them.  While the setup sounds complicated, the site is actually very well designed and easy to use. In addition there is quite a bit of help with examples so its easy to learn how to use all of the features.   Once you’ve done some setup, all you do is call the 800 number that Jott  provides, tell it who you want to email/text or what note you want update, dictate your message, and in a few minutes, your note is saved or your email is sent. You can even call to have Jott read news, weather, or any custom RSS feed (like one from irunabiz.com) back to you.

According to their web site Jott is “free while its in beta” which means that it could either  become a pay service on the turn of a dime, or disappear for lack of a viable business model. But, I plan to use it for as long as I can  (and I’d even consider paying for it if the price was right).  If you need to have some basic messaging and note functionality on your phone and don’t want to cough up the big bucks for a smart phone–give Jott a try.