Once upon a time in a past life I used to know a lot about other mobile email solutions out there – my job consisted of hopping around the Caribbean, island to island, launching BlackBerry’s. From Haiti to Bermuda I saw it all. On top of that I used to regularly have Nokia & Sony Ericsson sales reps around with their latest and greatest smartphones, and other mobile email solution providers hocking their goods (Seven, Good, Visto, Motorola, etc).
But in the past few months, in the deep thicket of Peek here, I have sort of lost track of the development of other solutions. So when I read the New York Times article “Why Push Gmail For BlackBerry is a Big Deal” last week, I was a bit perplexed. I was sure that at various points in my past lives I had used gmail and it was push??? And can’t users get BES & BIS to solve this answer ultimately?? But still, the fact that BlackBerry took this long to integrate Gmail to their corporate offering seems strange.
You see the secret to Gmail’s push has been around for a while. Gmail uses IMAP Idle. It is public and it is a standard’s based interface (well almost). It launched in October of 2007, and anybody can use it or build software using it. To hear that BlackBerry is only integrating it now in May of 2009… and on top of that they haven’t integrated very much with it – no tasks, one-way calendar, etc. I know, I know… some of you think its wrong of me “who is Peek to disparage somebody elses feature set”… but we don’t pretend to be a do-everything enterprise solution!
So now I’m curious, what do other mobile email solutions offer these days? I know Windows Mobile is a horrible experience – polling only (no push), eats battery, etc – but I wonder where the rest are at. I’ll post once I try a few more out.
