Push Email for Nokia Symbian S60 phones

Nokia have just launched a Beta version of their free push email service. Users with mobiles running Symbian 60 3rd Edition software, such as the Nokia N95, can sign up to use it on the Nokia Email website.

Once you’ve created your account, and entered your existing email details, you are sent a link to download the application to your phone. The service works by checking with your existing email provider for new messages and then pushing them over the air to your handset.

Push email works in a different way to email on your Desktop PC. Rather than logging on and retrieving your emails at specified intervals, the email application maintains a constant connection to the email servers so emails are delivered straight to your handset almost as soon as they are sent.

The great thing is that its doddle to set up, unlike the native email application on Nokia Handsets. You don’t need to change your email address and the service works with all POP3 and IMAP email providers. Corporate email and Hotmail are yet to be supported, but this could change in a future version.

The application runs quietly in the background, without any noticable drain on your battery. Emails can be set to come through instantly or you can manually check for new emails.

The one slight negative that I’ve found so far, is that it doesn’t mark emails as read on the server only on the handset. Not a problem for me, as I only get about ten emails a day, but for heavier business users this could lead to spending extra time sifting through the inbox figuring out which emails have been read. Hopefully this is something that will be addressed in future versions.

With Nokia Email you are able to:

• View, respond, forward, compose and delete emails.
• Manage your email inbox, outbox, drafts, and sent folders.
• Set the days and times your device receives email.
• Search contacts already stored on the handset.
• Call the sender direct from the email.

Currently there are 11 officially supported handsets, the E51, E61, E61i, E65, E66, E71, E90, N73, N80, N81 8gb and the Nokia N95. We’ve also tried this on the N82 and the N95 8gb, and it seems to work fine.

Head over to the Nokia Website for more details.