A system that extends Blackberry-style email-on-the-move services beyond the corporate world and to almost any recent mobile-phone has secured 150,000 subscribers in just four months since its launch in France.

But no British mobile-phone has yet taken up the Memova system, from messaging specialist Critical Path, though chief technology officer Mike Serbinis says 02 is looking at it.

One reason for its rapid success in France is that SFR, the French arm of Vodaphone, charges a flat 2.50 euros (£ 1.70) a month for forwarding any number of messages from just about any consumer email service - Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange-based corporate email is not supported.

The system uses MMS, the multimedia version of the SMS messaging system, which does not suffer the 160-character limit imposed on a text-message. The policy on attachments would vary with the operator but Memova is smart enough to recognise and cope with standard ones like jpegs that most modern phones can process.

Very large attachments are likely to be stripped out, if only because many models could not cope with them.

The system is targeted at the consumer market but Serbinis says many small businesses are also likely to be interested. He added that he suspected that SFR's flat-rate charging could change as the system exstablished.

Even so Memova could prove strong competition for Blackberry, which has been enjoying a mini-boom in the UK. Blackberry devices are now PDA market leaders, representing 25 percent of sales.