From now on, you can read your Yahoo! email on your cell phone. Well, with one condition: that you are the owner of certain phones from Sony, Sanyo or PalmOne. A more complete list is provided at the end of this article.

The service is brought by Yahoo! and Sprint that teamed up with a third company - Seven. Yahoo! Mail for Mobile is $2.99 per month, less than similar wireless e-mail services like BlackBerry from Research In Motion.

The users of this service will be able to send and receive e-mails, files and photos on & from their mobile phones. To receive their Yahoo! emails on their cell phone, the users have to sign-up, which is quite easy to do right from the telephone; there's no need to download additional software, and the messages are AES-level encrypted.

The phones will store the most recent 25 to 75 messages received (depending on the Palm device capacity) and will break larger emails into 1K to 3K per message (depending on the phone type).

While everybody agrees Yahoo! makes a step ahead on the web-based email market, the competition remains tensed. America Online introduced only last month a blog service to its own free e-mail service and since it was launched last year, Google's free web-based email service Gmail has gained a lot of credit.

Here are the phones that work with Yahoo's new wireless email service:

• Sprint PCS Multimedia MM A700 phones by Samsung
• MM 7400 and MM 5600 by Sanyo
• Sprint PCS Vision Smart Device Treo 600 and 650 from Palm One