A few weeks ago when I was having problems with Outlook I mentioned in passing emoze and said I would blog about it at a later date, well that time has come. Emoze is a service that allows you to have your email pushed to your mobile device (Symbian or Windows Mobile). It comes in a couple of flavours, the personal edition, which is free, and a corporate version, for which I couldn’t find any pricing. The latter is set to compete with RIM’s BlackBerry offering. I have been using push email with BlackBerry for a few years now and I was keen to see how they compared. I ran emoze on my Nokia N73 while I am using RIM’s offering on a BlackBerry curve.
emoze Installation is simple and the application sits in the background unobtrusively enough running as a native Nokia application. I am pushing out my Google mail emails and details for this were pre-configured so all I needed to do was enter my username and password. If you install the application on the phone rather than a memory card then you can also set emoze to startup automatically when you turn on the phone.
Emails arrive quickly and in most cases before they get to my Gmail account. When a mail arrives you get a discrete "beep" and a message telling you how many unread emails you have. You can then go through to the mailbox to view and read the mails. It is here that the service is at it’s weakest viewing emails, not that this is an emoze problem, but that email viewer on the Nokia is text only which means a lot of information gets stripped out. Still this is the same on the BlackBerry which also doesn’t have an HTML email viewer.
So far, so good. However, one thing that has been very noticeable is that emoze seems to be very heavy on battery use. I am now charging my phone every other day whereas before it would have been maybe once a week. Also sometimes the service needs a prod to get it going, particularly after going out of coverage. Also sometimes it seems to affect other data connections that refuse to connect until I shut down emoze.
On the whole it has all been a pretty positive experience with it doing what it says. It certainly seems to be an ideal solution for a small business or maybe a sole trader. That said I am concerned about the battery usage. I don’t make many calls on my Nokia so if you are a heavy call user that and emoze could finish off the battery before the end of the day. For corporate use BlackBerry still has more going for it but with emoze you get a better choice of devices.