Edesk lets you try a fully functional demo before you sign up, but the latter just involves choosing a username and providing an existing email address.

As well as access via a computer browser you can also view files on a GPRS phone, and the site boasts that you can 'keep working in the car'. Not, we hope, while driving. Although you only get 100MB of free space, you do get a lot of everything else. The Edesk Webtop is like an operating system in its own right. It hides the browser toolbars and menus (you may have to enable the advanced Javascript settings in Firefox) and gives a full-screen window with a set of icons along the top, and a start menu and taskbar along the bottom. In short, it works just like Windows, with multiple, resizeable application windows inside the main browser environment.

The main icons cover mail, addresses and contacts; an Ecabinet (which is a general-purpose store for personal records); an FTP client; an SMS client for sending messages to mobile phones (in India only at time of writing and not free); Google search and a Favourites folder; a powerful looking accounting package; and for those trading on the Indian National or Mumbai stock exchanges, a portfolio tracker.

Finally, there's the Edocuments folder which is the manager for uploading, downloading and storing your online files. The Start menu adds a couple of games to the mix - Sudoku and Ashes Cricket. Oddly, there are no icons or menu items for the word processor or spreadsheet, but you can get at these from the Edocuments folder.

The word processor is simple, with three rows of self-evident buttons, but no menus. You get tables, styles, 30 fonts, and the facility to insert images, media or Flash animations. The spelling checker failed to work, with an error message saying that a third-party IE add-in was needed. Although sharing a stored document is a one-click process, the URL that this returned didn't work either. The question offile formats remained unresolved, as we were unable to edit any uploaded Word or Open Office document - we had to resort to copying and pasting from an offline word processor into the Edesk one. Also there is no 'Save As' or 'Export' facility from within the word processor-you have to do this from the Edocuments folder. You can, however, save an open document to your hard disk as a PDF.

The spreadsheet bears the legend' powered by Zoho' , and seems functionally identical to the one hosted at Zoho, but unlike the latter it didn't appear to support macros or pivot tables. It did, however open uploaded Excel- but not Open Office - spreadsheets.

There is no presentation software with Edesk, but that may not bother a lot of people, and as we stated earlier there's plenty of other stuff. The Usage icon shows exactly how much of your allocated space you are using, along with a price list of storage upgrades.

Another feature we liked was the import/export rrom the start menu. If you've set up the email side of Edesk you can import address books and emails from your own computer. The export feature impressed us more. Two clicks create a zipfile of all your Edocuments and downloads it to your own computer. Finally, the online help is in the form of a wiki, which frankly didn't help us with the problems we encountered.