alternative to blackberry

[Guest sbaker]

We need an email capable phone but it will not be used a great deal. Are there any alternatives to blackberry which come close for ease of use? Do any of the others give automatic notification of new post? Thanks

[Guest Confucious]

Smartphones can be set to check every 15mins or varying time intervals for one account. What sort of email are you talking about? Exchange server? ISP? Web based?

The blackberry is a dedicated email deviceand if you have a lot of email it's ideal but is not a very good phone.

If you want a great phone and to check your email a Smartphone is ideal.

HTH

[Guest Matt Kirby]

Only thing to note is AFAIK there is (currently) no way of doing Blackberry style push-email on current Smartphones.

One possible work-around is to use Orange email (assuming you are on Orange).

You can set up your existing email address to forward (or copy) email to your Orange email address, and Orange will send you a text to tell you you have new mail. I think that there might be some kind of rules-filtering, so you can set it up to only text you when the email is marked as urgent or is from a certain person.

If you are on Orange have a look here for details.

Edited August 17, 2005 by Matt Kirby

[Guest sbaker]

Thanks for the useful replies. The email is through our ISP- PlusNet. I'm now a little confused about what exactly "push" mail on blackberry is, and how it differs from others. Confucius say :) that smartphones can be set up together with ISP to alert every 15 mins.- that would suit us fine. I also had a look at the Orange link and that looks good too, but I'd like to look at other line providers. Could you outline for this techno-ignoramous the difference? Thanks.

[Guest Matt Kirby]

"Push" email works like this:

Email is recieved by the Blackberry system, and the system downloads (or "pushes") it to your Blackberry.

Usual email (using POP3) works like this:

You set your phone to log into your email system every 15 mins (for example), and if there is email your phone will download it for you. This could be called the "pull" method as your device has to check for new email regularly and pull new messages down for you to read.

With a Blackberry email "just appears" on your device, in a similar way that text messages arrive on phones. With standard email you have to check email yourself, or set your phone to do it for you (which will start a GPRS session which you will be charged for - not that there is much data involved in polling a mailbox).

Hope that makes it a bit clearer!

[Guest Confucious]

You're phone can connect every 15 mins and check to see if there's email waiting, if there is you can set it to download either just headers, the first x number of bytes or the whole message. If you just download headers or x number of bytes you can then connect to download the rest of the message if you want too.

Push email does not rely on you're phone connecting and checking, you don't connect at all but when a message arrives it is automatically "pushed" to your phone.

With a Smartphone you will be using data (although not a lot) every time you connect whereas with push email you don't use any data if you don't have any email.

Most Smartphones in the UK are sold by Orange although T-Mob have recently started selling them, you would have to check out their website to see if they offer a similar text for email service but if your phone is checking anyway this is a bit superfluous.

HTH

[Edit] I started my repluy, got distracted and Matt had replied before I finished posting - D'Oh. I hadn't seen his post, sorry! [/Edit]

Edited August 17, 2005 by Confucious

[Guest Matt Kirby]

[Edit] I started my repluy, got distracted and Matt had replied before I finished posting - D'Oh. I hadn't seen his post, sorry! [/Edit]

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

The amount of times I've done that myself! :)

[Guest sbaker]

That was very helpful, thankyou. Push v. Pull was a revelation! I definitely don't now want a B'berry. I will keep a lookout for the text-for-mail services but I think pulling is the way to go as it will widen the choice of providers and we don't really need the push service if the volume of mail is as low as I think it will be. One further query: what do I look for in a phone's specs for the regular checking-in capability? Also, I was impressed with the Nokia 6600 , but there aren't many deals still going on what is now an old phone. :cry:

[Guest Confucious]

This is a SmartPhone forum, we know all about them but N*kias are niot SmartPhones and are generally considered a swearword arround here. Sorry, can't help with them - try a N*kia forum

[Guest JBW]

in concerns to push email, the new exchange service pack + windows mobile 5 will offer push email to those corporate users out there (or power home users who decided to shell out for the likes of small business server and set up their own exchange solution).

[Guest sbaker]

Can anyone suggest some smartphones which can be set to retrieve email automatically at regular intervals? thanks

[Guest Confucious]

C550

Any SmartPhone can, the C550 is judst the latest and best (until the next one comes out!)

[Guest Socrates]

If you are planning on using POP mail or an Exchange Server 2003 then the smartphone cannot be beat. the downside of using POP is that you have to come up with a SPAM filtering strategy. The problem with Exchange is that unless you already have it, open up your wallet - Although the way that SBS and server hardware are priced these days I find it hard to understand why any Small Business would NOT put one in.

With a timer on POP or with Always Up To Date (and a registry mod to shorten the timer), it gets "close enough" to blackberry's quick delivery feature, but it also allows you felxibility.

The only thing I would NOT count on is using a Smartphone to connect to your desktop via VPN to sync mail. This generates duplcate items and really screws things up. After a couple months of desperately seeking out anyone that had this actually working, I gave up and finally just bodged together a server box and installed the NFR copy of Small Business Server that I had laying around. I know that MS claims the reason that network syncing was eliminiated was security, but I think the reality is that they just couldn't make it work right.

PS. In the US, on Verizon, if you can live with the overpriced Samsung i600, they have a Push service based on Intellisync that one of my customers is using (although with a PPC instead of a Smartphone). It works GREAT, and it pushes out TASKS, which for some people is a big fat must have, and for some retarded reason MS left out of the pseudo-push features of Exchange server. It does't require Exchange, just have to sign up the service and install a process on the desktop and the device.