S60 and mobile technology | OBSIDIAL

So I’ve been using Nokia’s new email service for a little while now, and since it is now out of the “really Beta” stage and is officially on Nokia Beta Labs, I’m thinking that I’ll throw a short review of the service up here and how it stacks up against other offerings such as Emoze.

Usability: the thing I really liked about this application is the SMS provisioning.  For those of us without a qwerty-based device (I’m using the N95) being able to get the app running without keying in POP3 and SMTP server address on the device is a blessing.  Everyone should do this.

Integration with the OS:  Here’s an area that I think Nokia messed up.  EMail is a form of messaging, right? Shouldn’t Nokia’s Email client be integrated with the Messaging center in S60? Right now it shows up as a seperate application in your Apps folder.  Other messaging (email or otherwise) like Emoze and even Gizmo, the SIP/IM application, show up as additional tabs in your Messaging center.  This is perfect, and the way it should be.

Stability: Well…it’s a beta, so I’m not going to beat it up a whole lot here, but since I installed it, I seem to be getting little debugging-like screen pop-ups. Things like KERN-EXEC Error, when it crashes, or when I installed another app (specifically Emoze) it gave strange notifications based on what I was doing: for instance when I was entering in my credentials, it gave pop-ups like “User input” etc.  I’m sure this is all caused by some debugging switch left on in the application or some new support file EMail needs, but it’s weird nonetheless.

PUSH/general eMail issues: Push seems to work OK, but sometimes not…ran a few tests and sometimes it was 10-15 minutes before I got the mail.  Somtimes it was a minute.  Statying connected to my email inbox however I found was BETTER than Emoze, which consistanly seemed to disconnect and ask to reconnect (something it should just do automatically)  Nokia Email had no such issues.

Notification: This is the area that REALLY irks me about this product.  Everytime I get an email, I do not receive an on-screen notification..only the little “email sound” tells me that there is something there.  This is something that is an actual “deal breaker” kind of thing for me, but maybe I just have a setting wrong. 

I’m going to continue testing this app, I really like the updated UI and the feeling that it won’t disconnect itself like Emoze does.