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At CTIA Wireless 2007 in Orlando last week, mobile software developer Handmark demonstrated the fourth edition of Pocket Express, its wireless news and information service for a wide variety of mobile devices and platforms, including RIM BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, the Palm OS, among others.

We sat down with the company's co-founder Douglas Edwards who walked us through Pocket Expresses new features on a BlackBerry. These include Flight Status, Flight Schedules, Hotel Search, Currency Conversion, Travel Phone Numbers, all in a new travel channel.

But first, here's what Pocket Express, which Handmark first conceptualized four years ago, according to Edwards, is all about:

The software downsizes the Web to make it more manageable or usable for small-screened mobile devices. It uses a channel metaphor, rather than a browser, to deliver Internet content to PDAs and smartphones. Handmark asserts the service is faster than mobile Web surfing by orders of magnitude.

Edwards explained to SmartPhoneToday that they first envisioned Pocket Express as a RSS reader for mobile devices. But because the company wanted "people to have a predictable experience," he said, "like a newspaper" (at best a 19th century technology that still survives into the 21st century for that very reason), they went with the channel metaphor. Open up USA Today or any other paper and you're sure to know the exact place the type articles and information you want is located.

A competitor like Avantgo from Sybase 365, to Edwards, is a collection of hosted Web sites that relies too much on third-parties. You never know if a mobile site you choose to load onto your device has been updated or even exists anymore.

Whereas Sprint, for example, a customer of Handmark that offers Pocket Express with every one of its EV-DO (3G-enabled) handsets requires that the software company meets the same five nines (99.999 percent) requirements the operator itself is always reaching for. The five nines are telco operators attempt to get as close to 100 percent uptime for voice calls as possible. (Even so, anyone will attest to still getting dropped calls, especially with cellular service.)

Currently, a free edition of Pocket Express offers news, sports and weather channels, while a paid version ($9.99 per month or $99.99 per year) adds stock tracking, street maps with turn-by-turn directions, movie reviews and show times, Oxford references, 411 directory searching, Dear Abbey, a MobileCierge service when you need live assistance, and other content.

Sports coverage, for example, delivers scores and information from major sports in real time; be it inning by inning, quarter by quarter or half by half. The news service arrives directly from the AP wire. And users can choose to have content, including weather, updated as often as they like.

According to Edwards, in addition to outperforming a mobile Web browser, Pocket Express makes it easier for users to find the information they want than even a carrier's deck. As a result, the service has the net effect of doubling APRU (average revenue per user) for a device, even though it functions outside the walled garden.

Increasingly, carriers are looking to data services - be it e-mail, SMS, MMS, video, TV, radio etc. - to make up for the loss of voice revenues, a part of the market that is pretty much saturated at this point.

With this in mind, Handmark will make the most of the new travel channel’s services available as part of the free version of Pocket Express. Essentially, the premium edition adds the new Flight Status feature, which Edwards asserted is unique because of the way OAG compiles the information about flight delays and cancellations, as well as arrivals and departures, including time, terminal, gate and baggage claim details.

OAG actually uses desktop PCs to gather flight status information, making them much timelier than the airlines own methods for gathering the same data. In fact, the flight information you see on monitors at the airports is from OAG, not the airlines directly.

According to Edwards, updates to version 4.0 of Pocket Express won't be available until later this spring, at the end of May..

He added it was safe to assume we'll see new devices and platforms supported by the software this year: including Nokia's Eseries S60 smartphones and several Motorola’s handset models.