Like many people I rely on keeping up to date with my email on a very regular basis and often the only way to do this is through my mobile phone. On my old Nokia N95 and now my 5800 touch screen device I have relied on the free service from Nokia that acts as a push facility. In the past this has been reasonably reliable with the odd drop out of service but for free you have to bite your lip and go with the flow. This week, however, the service has been down for two days and I have not been able to log into my Nokia account to see what the hell is going on so I needed to look for a replacement.
Unlike Windows Mobile there is not a lot of choice when it comes to a phone biased email clients for Symbian devices and the built in system is not that flexible. I found a client called Profimail but to be honest it had one hell of an ugly interface and I’d rather cut off body parts with blunt scissors and feed them to rabid rats than use it. Then I discovered Emoze.
Emoze is available as a free service if you use one email account and there is a Pro version if you want more than one email account and a few extra bolt on goodies all for the exorbitant sum of €10 a year (for anyone who took the “exorbitant” seriously it was a joke, I cannot believe this service costs so little).
Emoze can handle Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, Facebook and OWA accounts. Each new account is given it’s own folder with an individual icon and you can create extra folders for filing emails. As you would expect you can create, reply and forward emails as well as save them to a draft folder and there is limited calendar and contact syncing available. Syncing with Google Calendar is not yet available but this is coming soon.
If your battery and data plan can cope you can have the service on all the time and your email will be sent to your phone as soon as it drops in to your server inbox or you can schedule it to poll the server from anything from five minutes to 24 hours. If you don’t think your data plan will cope with an always on service you can just exit the program and restart it when you want to pick up mail.
While looking for an email program I discovered Googasync which links your Symbian phone’s built in PIM with Google calendar. It is fast It is very configurable and provides:
- Bi-directional synchronization
- Really easy to use, syncing can’t be easier than this!
- Support for multiple calendars
- Automatic / Scheduled synchronization
- Provides cost savings by using Wi Fi when available
- Support for hosted Google Apps accounts
- Support for normal Google accounts
- Standard appointments, repeating events, birthdays and all-day events
- Full synchronization and fast synchronization (transfers only changes)
- Reminders and alerts
- Configurable roaming protection keeps you safe from bill shocks
- Technical support and one year free upgrades
- Secure and easy to use, your account information is not stored to 3rd party servers.
What impressed me was that any tasks on my phone PIM was placed onto my Google Calendar so it looks as though I won’t be needing Remember The Milk any more.
So, for some serious Googling and about 20 minutes online I have found two seriously flexible services that will make my new 5800 a joy to use. Life can be good sometimes!
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