Out of the box with most Nokia phones of recent times, there is generally two ways getting your emails delivered straight to your device. The first is by using the standard S60 Messaging application, which is designed primarily for SMS messages. To this end, HTML email is not supported, and it is usually quite a pain to setup a mailbox from scratch.
The more recent solution for S60 handsets is to use Nokia Messaging. This is a much more well rounded email experience. It supports HTML, is very easy to setup and provides a certain amount of eye candy. The problem with Nokia Messaging is one of reliability. Some Nokia phones do not experience any problems at all, whilst others seem to have very frequent outages, with seemingly no support or explanations from Nokia. One caveat though, is that Nokia Messaging is still in Beta form, and that can be used as the excuse everytime.
However, if you are an email fanatic, and must get your emails instantly, or have ever seen how a Blackberry handles email, neither of the two Nokia solutions are satisfactory.
This is where Emoze steps in.
Now, there are two different flavours of Emoze, and this write up is centred around the Basic version, and not the Pro one. Although I’m sure functionality is generally the same between both, just with extra features on the Pro version. You can download Emoze either by visiting their website, where you can recieve an SMS link, or download the installer file to your PC. Alternatively, visit m.emoze.com in your phones browser.
What Emoze does, is add a mailbox to the standard S60 Messaging application. How this differs mainly to doing it manually, is that it is very easy to setup, and it supports HTML.
I have got Emoze setup with my Gmail account, and on the whole it performs admirably. Performance is excellent, and generally delivers mail to my N86 even before it shows up on my Gmail webpage. Integration throughout the operating system is also very good. For instance, if I want to email one of the photo’s I have taken with my N86, I simply chose ‘Send’ from the photo menu, select my Emoze mailbox, and it will then create a new email, and attach the photo.
Another great feature, that is often overlooked is synchronisation of your contacts and calendar items. Not only is this functionality useful on a day to day basis, it is also imperative in case your phone gets lost, stolen or malfunctions. The integration with Google Calendar is fantastic, and works flawlessly. Google Contacts is a bit more of a mixed bag. Generally, not because of Emoze, but because the way Google handles it’s contacts is not entirely straight forward. After the initial contact sync, in which all contacts both within Google, and on the phone are just merged, it took me a fair amount of time to sort them all out into some sort of order. Hopefully though, after my hour or so of housekeeping, my contacts should now be fine. All I would advise, is to make sure you do a backup first using PC Suite.
There is some way to go for Emoze before it can be recognised as one of the great email applications for S60, but luckily, nothing too major for the team to worry about. I came across a few small bugs and annoyances, which I shall just run through now, but none of them are show-stoppers, and I will most definitely be using Emoze as my preferred mailbox weapon of choice for the foreseeable future.
HTML email is somewhat hit and miss. I would say on average about 30% of HTML emails come through as plain text with a link to the web page version. This may be something to do with the original way the email was built, I don’t know. However, when a HTML email does show up properly, once you have scroll down, it doesn’t like scrolling back up. That may just be a simple bug.
The other problem I found was when using my phone in offline mode. If Emoze is still running in the background, it does not seem to be able to recognise that the phone is in offline mode, and starts beeping every do often to inform you that it cannot connect to mailbox. The easy way around this is to simply close the Emoze background application.
Other than that though Emoze truly does ‘just work’. It has been 100% reliable, and I can completely depend on it to deliver my critical mail. For this, I would highly recommend it. The basic version is great, and has awesome functionality considering it is completely free to use. The Pro version comes in at a very reasonable 5 Euros per 6 months, and gets a whole host of extra features such as multiple mailboxes. You can check this out HERE.
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Below you will find a short video (apologies for the croaky voice, I’m recovering from a heavy cold!) to show you Emoze working on a Nokia N86. HD version is available if you view this video direct on YouTube.
