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.
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