Nokia to Offer Free Blackberry-style 'Push' E-mail

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Nokia to Offer Free Blackberry-style 'Push' E-mail

One-year free service will forward e-mail to the phone as it arrives.

Peter Judge, Techworld.com
Tuesday, July 05, 2005

LONDON -- Nokia is planning to offer free "push" e-mail on all its
handsets, according to software vendor Seven, in a bid to boost the
use of mobile e-mail.

"It's a market grab," said Paul Hedman, Seven's European MD and the
former CEO of Seven's acquisition Smartner, whose software is involved
in the deal. "Nokia is going out very aggressively offering one year's
free push email for POP and IMAP users on Nokia phones."

The free service will forward email to the phone as it arrives, making
POP and IMAP email easier to use on a mobile phone. If it takes off,
it will be a useful revenue boost for mobile operators -- only the
application service is free, and users will pay normal GPRS rates for
the data sent and received. "It's a good way to stimulate usage of
GPRS," said Hedman.

"After a year, the users will get an SMS message inviting them to pay
a low fee to continue the service," said Hedman. He expects the fee to
be around $35 per year -- roughly the current level for the service
where it is available.

"The interesting thing will be how large a take-up rate we will have
on consumers," said Hedman. In the United States, last month. Seven
said it got very fast download rates for the client it launched to
deliver Yahoo e-mail on phones using the Sprint service: "In the first
week we had tens of thousands of downloads," Hedman said.

Hot Topic

Explosive growth of BlackBerry devices has made push e-mail a hot
topic, since Microsoft hastily added it to Windows Mobile and Exchange
after its latest version of Windows Mobile was criticized for lacking
push.

The BlackBerry device, from Research in Motion (RIM) still has a
commanding lead, with three million customers, but there is a
potential user base of 650 million enterprise email customers, and
many more consumers, said Hedman. RIM's solution is still effectively
tied to specialist hardware, and Microsoft's is currently limited to
the combination of Exchange and Windows Mobile, said Hedman.

http://www.pcworld.com/news/articl [...] 05X,00.asp


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