exchange & push email

[psohl]

I'm very close to deciding on a smartphone but maybe I missed something..can someone tell me why I'm waiting for push email for windows mobile? Smartphone already syncs with Outlook and checks for emails, and I can send and/or reply to email without activesync...right?

[Mike Temporale]

Yup, you can pull email no problem. It's either done based on a schedule or you can tell Exchange to send an SMS to your device whenever you get mail and then force a sync. The biggest problem with SMS Sync is the cost of SMS messages. Otherwise, both systems work great.

Push email, just lets you get email as it happens, and thus saves cost by checking on a regular basis when nothing is there.

Outlook sync doesn't give you live email. It only transfers email when you connect your phone to your computer.

Does that answer your questions?

[Sven Johannsen]

can someone tell me why I'm waiting for push email for windows mobile?
Because you are so important and your counsel is so valuable that it is imperative to the success of yourself, your company and the free world that you get your e-mail messages in your hand the instant they appear at the mail server. Oh, and none of the people that need you to be instantly accessible are aware of the existence of voice calls, IM and text messaging.

[Mike Temporale]

Hrm, I'm guessing Sven isn't too interested in the whole push email thing. ;)

[subzerohf]

I'm very close to deciding on a smartphone but maybe I missed something..can someone tell me why I'm waiting for push email for windows mobile? Smartphone already syncs with Outlook and checks for emails, and I can send and/or reply to email without activesync...right?

I've tried pulling email via ActiveSync every 15 min. Sounds rather reasonable on first thought, right?

The problem is that every ActiveSync connection requires roughly 15 k of data usage - that is if I have no email. The data usage will be considerably higher if there is new email. Anyway, for the sake of argument, I have no new email. At this rate, assuming my phone is on 10 hours a day, I wil be using 600k of data a day, which is 3 MB a week (5 business days only), which is 12 MB a month. Roughly.

Like you, I live in Ontario. I am a Rogers customer. I got the $40/7mb plan. Anything over 7mb is $10/mb (I think). So 12 mb will cost me a whopping $90 per month. That is if I don't have any email for the entire month.

Fortunately, Rogers already has a push-email solution called MyMail, which is basically a Visto solution (btw, Visto is sueing Microsoft over patents). Other carriers like Telus and Cingular have also branded the Visto solution with their own name. With push email, data usage is based on actual email downloaded onto the phone. When there is no email, there is a little connection noises going on, but the cost is negligible. My data usage is around 3 mb per month. I still have 4 mb for browsing the web, and downloading weather data every day .

BTW, my coworkers who are crack berry junkies won't look down on me when their devices buzz during a meeting, my phone buzzes at the time - not 15 minutes later. Push email rules! 8)

[shindullin]

It also depends on who your carrier is. I have a cingular medianet plant with 1000 sms messages and 5mgs of data. I also have 4smartphone.com sends my phone a sms telling it to sync whenever I get an email. I doubt I'll be using up the 1000 sms messages in a month as I am old and have very few friends who actually send these things. So the SMS solution is a good one for me. Just as fast as push and not as data/or battery intensive as checking yourself every 15 mins. This is also a good solution if your office (like mine) ban's outlook.

[subzerohf]

.... I doubt I'll be using up the 1000 sms messages in a month as I am old and have very few friends who actually send these things. ....

Anyone who is smart enough to use a smartphone is young at heart :wink: