Tools for mobile phone and connected computer
The mobile phone applications discussed here, such as FrontlineSMS, run 'locally' on a computer, and can be accessed without using the internet or any other computer network.
Conduct surveys on your phone
Collect data on your mobile phone and send it back to a laptop or other computer.
EpiSurveyor is a free Open Source tool which runs on Personal Digital Assistants and will soon be available for other types of mobile phone. It allows you to design a form for a survey on your computer and send it to your PDA. Then you conduct the survey using your PDA and send the information that you've gathered back to your computer. You can collect the data from several Personal Digital Assistant devices and combine it into a single table, which can be exported to be analysed.
Other data-collection tools are available for mobile phones but they are not generally Open Source.
SMS hubs
An SMS hub is a stand-alone system which allows you to send and receive large numbers of text messages via the mobile phone network, without needing to be connected to the internet or to any other computer network. Read more about SMS hubs.