.Dust

If you are not a road war­rior cor­po­rate user with one of those fancy Black­Berry (Web Site) device, and still want to be able to access you sev­eral e-​mail accounts there are sev­eral options you can look at:

• Gmail Java Client

This is one of the lat­est addi­tion the mobile java e-​mail clients. You can down­load your own copy of the appli­ca­tion point­ing your web browser http://​gmail​.com/​app. Very nice appli­ca­tion with a clean Google User Inter­face. Please note that the links to down­load the appli­ca­tion will only work from your phone wap/​web browser.

• Mova­Mail Java Client

Another Java based e-​mail client. This does not come for free since it will cost you 2.95 USD per month. The appli­ca­tion comes in two dif­fer­ent fla­vor. A very sim­ple one with­out sup­port for send­ing attach­ments or tak­ing pic­ture from inside the appli­ca­tion and a more com­plex one with those func­tion­al­i­ties turned on. This appli­ca­tion will sup­port dif­fer­ent e-​mail accounts at the same time.

• Flurry Java Client

Still Java. Sev­eral e-​mail accounts are sup­ported at the same time. My per­sonal opin­ion is that the User Inter­face is less attrac­tive com­pared to Gmail and Mova­Mail. Unfor­tu­nately attach­ments are not sup­ported. You can user it for free.

• Berggi Java Client

Java, again. The main fea­ture of berggi is that it can be installed on low end devices with­out prob­lems (not per­son­ally tested). It does not sup­port any kind of attach­ments but inte­grates sup­port for Instant Mes­sag­ing and free text mes­sag­ing. From this point of view it’s not only an e-​mail client but some­thing dif­fer­ent. This appli­ca­tion will cost you 9.99 USD a month.

I think these are the main appli­ca­tions you may want to give a chance.

Some con­sid­er­a­tions:

• Too often the native email appli­ca­tion on your phone has poor per­for­mance and very bad user inter­face but has some major advan­tages that will become clear if you will con­tinue to read.
• You need to remem­ber that all of these appli­ca­tion will require data enabled in your plan. Depend­ing on what plan you are on you may have to pay for data trans­fer and some oper­a­tor are really expen­sive out­side their walled garden.
• Even if there are appli­ca­tions that allow you to send attach­ments it’s very dif­fi­cult that the Java secu­rity model cho­sen by the oper­a­tor will allow you to access the phone mem­ory. The same will hap­pen, in most cases, for the access to your cam­era. This will not hap­pen with the native email client.
• You can­not put (today) a Java appli­ca­tion in back­ground. Every time you will need to access you e-​mail you will need to launch the appli­ca­tion. More­over you will not be able to get auto­matic check for new mails. (Sev­eral native email appli­ca­tion sup­port this). You can­not get any kind of push email as well. This will not hap­pen with the native email client.
• The Java secu­rity model will ask you per­mit to access data con­nec­tion every time the email appli­ca­tion will try to access the data net­work. Depend­ing on the imple­men­ta­tion on your phone you will be asked for this one or sev­eral times dur­ing your ses­sion. If you are a heavy user this will become annoy­ing very soon. This will not hap­pen with the native email client.

Is there any­thing inno­v­a­tive in this sce­nario? I think yes.

One of the thing that you learn in an inno­va­tion team is that inno­va­tion does not really require to build extra­or­di­nary new things. You can take what you have in a dif­fer­ent shape and that is inno­va­tion toot.

In mobile email the bits and pieces are already all there, they sim­ply need to be com­bined in a dif­fer­ent way.

Here’s my inno­v­a­tive email client:

• Native appli­ca­tion. I really am in love with Java but for this appli­ca­tion I would go with a native email client.
• Can man­age dif­fer­ent email accounts from one sin­gle place.
• Gmail like user interface.
• Attach­ment man­age­ment with­out lim­i­ta­tions in size. (Ok, on this I’m quite lucky since I’m run­ning on HSDPA)
• Flat rate data plan.
• Auto­mat­i­cally check for new mail on a reg­u­lar basis.
• Inte­grated access to phone camera.
• Some­times I may want transcod­ing of attached files. That’s a dif­fi­cult one, spe­cially if you are using stan­dard email services.

Is this inno­v­a­tive? No, if you look at any sin­gle piece. It may be inno­v­a­tive if you may get all together.

As often hap­pens in the mobile world the sup­port from the oper­a­tor is crit­i­cal to the success.

Why do I blog this?

This is a good exam­ple of how inno­va­tion may reuse exist­ing stuff to cre­ate new and dif­fer­ent prod­ucts and ser­vices. Reusing what you already have should be a con­sis­tent part of the inno­va­tion process.

Related posts:

1. links for 2006-​11-​22
2. What I want from a Music Phone