Link: The Mobile Technology Weblog: Push Email for 3.
I wrote a little on this last night when I was shocked to find a Nokia E61 on sale on three.co.uk.
Hutchison 3G has announced it the launch of a push-email service for their handsets.
It doesn’t, on the face of it, look like a bad service. Apart from the ridiculously low data allowances. They’re fine if you’re my mother, getting 2 or 3 emails a day, but I get hundreds, sometimes almost 1,000. It’s not that I’m a fun guy per se, it’s that I get reports from servers, statistics updates every hour, backup confirmations and blah blah blah. It’s all organised nicely when it arrives on my desktop. However my Blackberry is continually updating when I’m out and about. Perhaps I’m not a typical user though.
I had a look through the PDF install guides. It looks reasonably straight forward and you don’t necessarily have to be an Exchange user.
You install a piece of software on you computer. That monitors Outlook. When your computer receives mail, that software whacks a note over to your phone. So it’s nearly-instant email. And vice versa. Write a mail on your handset and woosh, it’s delivered by your PC. Good enough for most.
I’d maybe try it out on a whim. I’m due a Three upgrade in a 6 months time.
As Tom notes, the actual instant mail facility is provided by AlwaysOnMail. One ultra nifty facility it offers with Series 60 handsets is the ability to sync your contacts and calendar too. I really like that element in particular.
If you fancy looking at the Nokia E61 (or others) on Three, this is the link you need: here.