News

Push email comes to Symbian - Nokia series 60 and 80 get MailX

This week may well see Microsoft announce its "Magneto" operating system for PDAs and Smartphones - and push email is expected to be high on the agenda. Symbian sees this as the responsibility of outside developers:  Bitween, for example.

Bitween first released its "personal edition" of MailX in January for Nokia's computer-format phones - the 9500 and 9300 communicators; but the new version is aimed at the Series 60 smartphone range, and has been greeted with modest enthusiasm.

"It's software to allow your phone to have Push Email support on a standard POP3 or IMAP account for Series 60," observed AllAboutSymbian. "Support for multiple accounts, custom message alerts, secure and 'in the clear' IMAP and 128bit encryption are available."

Exactly how much of "mobile push" of email is intellectual property owned by Visto, remains to be seen. So far, Visto hasn't said anything about either Magneto, or MailX - and the existence of RIM shows that push email to hand-helds can be done without infringing Visto patents. But once Magneto is out in the open and MailX appears on a mainstream phone, there will be some anxious holding of breath while Visto lawyers examine the technology.

Restart Press:

Comment May 31 from Roberto LA Ragione, CEO of Bitween:

I saw your news posted on 9th of May 2005 about our Mailx application.

AllAboutSymbian breaks the news.

 The original MailX release

Mailx is a plugin that works over the normal messaging system , which emulates the always on technology. So we didn't infringe any patents - because the concept is different.

Visto uses mail as a transport layer . Instead mailx notifies the event to the phone and the phone retrieve the mail without using our server - it goes directly with the pop / imap account.

This is a big difference between our technologies and Visto technology ; we use a completely different approach to solve the same problem. So please correct your news because we don't use the same technology as RIM and Visto does...