Nokia Email Service Beta Come and Gone.

Nokia recently announced the availability of the email service, push mail for the rest of us. I was very excited, setup my account, and was off to the world of push email by Nokia. After using the service for around 2 weeks here is my 2 cents.

Installation

The process they have for installing the email service is very straight forward. You go to http://email.nokia.com, sign up for an account, and Nokia services sends you a SMS message to your phone with the link to download the software. While I would have much preferred to just OTA installation this was easily and worked seamless for me.

Interface

At first glance the UI was nice with floating icons and nice graphics. I really appreciated the new mailbox screen where the messages where sorted by date and very easy to find. While the UI was nice it wasn't without quirks. For starters if you went into the folders to view a different folder and click back then hide it will actually take you back to the main email screen again instead of hiding the application. After doing this several times over the trial period I found myself annoyed when attempting to hide the application in the background.

The performance was par with the new user interface. When I give it the par rating its because of one thing. When working from the home screen and you click the inbox to go view your current messages it take an extended amount of time, while viewing a blank screen, for the emails to display properly. This is an area that needs to be improved greatly for success with the product in my opinion. With competition now very strong in the and ease of use of the blackberry, and yes even the iPhone mail something like that will simply not cut it for the enterprise crowd.

Accountability

Having come from blackberries to S60 I had high hopes for email. Honestly its not that great at the moment. I would say it gets the job done and that's all that matters to me at the moment. When it comes to all that the N95 has to offer I gladly trade sub par email for what I call life features. This leads me to my next point with Nokia's new email service. A person like me who depends heavily on email from multiple accounts, well, requires multiple accounts. This feature is currently not available and led me to switch back and forth between messaging and Email (Nokia's email service app). Come on Nokia! Please add the ability to use multiple email accounts with the service. Have some accountability.

Push Me

The new buzz word these days is push email. As stated above I came from the kind of push, blackberry. When I heard that Nokia was thinking about getting into this game for the consumer ( yes I know about E-Series) I was excited about the impact this would have on my N95 usage. Well, they got the push part right but that's about it. What about move delete etc? In my usage I found myself very frustrated by the fact that if I deleted a message on my device it did not delete it on my server. Typically you would think of a email service to truly sync your usage on your account. For example if I read a message on my N95 I would like it marked read on my server. Most of all when I reply to a message I want the reply to be placed on my sent messages folder and the message marked as replied. I might have assumed to much but I thought this would all be in place. Hopefully with future releases these changes will be in place. In my opinion the icon named sync should be renamed check email for the trial period because that's all it does.

Wrap Up

After two weeks I cut my trial short due to these problems. I found myself very frustrated having to manage my email in multiple places. I know this service is in beta so we will just have to wait and see what the future holds for the Nokia email service. I hope improvments are made because I for one see heavy usage of something like this. This is my 2 cents take it or leave it.

Happy July 4th.

I hope everybody has a wonderful July 4th celebration. Above pictured is my son riding on a tractor. Life just wouldn't be the same without our offspring. Have a great rest of the weekend.

N95 tuff little @#$#

I have committed a sin. I have dropped my N95 directly onto pavement from about 3 feet. It was not a pretty site. I was getting out of my car and forgot my phone was in my lap. The next thing I know my phone is falling and I hear smack!!!! I look down and my phone is in at least 3 peaces. As the panic hits me I realize that luckily I would be able to peace it back together. It seems that when it hit the pavement it caught the bottom left corner and popped off the battery case, battery alone with the back slide of the entire phone. With a little push here and pull there I was able to peace it back together. 

Once I had it all back to looking normal, minus the huge gash in the corner, I attempted to power it back on. To my surprise I see that beautiful Nokia logo spash on the screen followed by the tones I thought I would never be happy to hear. While this lesson taught me several things not to do it also shows how tuff these little guys are. Thank goodness for decent plastic of this guy would have bit the dust and I would have been a very unhappy camper. Until next time.  

Nokia Push Mail Service?

I don't know about you other Nokia heads out there but I've been dying for a replacement for my blackberry push style email. While the native client is okay it lacks a lot as far as details go. For instance there is no date/time in the view which can be annoying at times. Have my dreams been answered with the new up and coming push email service from Nokia. Head over to Darla Mack's blog and have a read and find more details.