Nokia Email service graduates as part of Nokia Messaging

Nokia Mail graduates from the beta labs finally. I’ve been using this for a while now and it’s pretty good. I do not have the experience of a Blackberry to compare, but it surpasses all other mobile email I’ve ever used.

Nokia Email service graduates as part of Nokia Messaging: ”

Written by Davis Fields, Nokia Messaging team

Hello,

It’s Davis Fields and I’m happy to announce the official release of Nokia Messaging. Please go to http://email.nokia.com to download the latest version. I’m also proud to say that we are graduating the program from Beta Labs. The Nokia Messaging team has gained so much from you, our users, during our time here. We started our beta in August 2008 with the first release of Nokia Email service. We will be rolling out the service on a country by country basis starting with Australia, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Singapore, Spain, the United Kingdom and Venezuela. You are free to continue using the service until it’s commercially available in your location.

Here are the highlights of this release:

  • Support for Yahoo! Mail
  • Support for more Nokia S60 phones
  • Support for up to ten email addresses
  • Support for subfolders for IMAP email accounts
  • Support for Google Apps hosted email and other vanity domain email addresses
  • Flagged messages will automatically become starred messages in Gmail
  • More intuitive inbox navigation via a discoverable control bar
  • Faster opening of inbox
  • Sent email will be synced to your webmail’s sent folder for all email addresses

I can say that most of these features came from your requests, and I hope you enjoy this new release. I can also say that we are by no means done with our work – this is the first official release but we will continue to regularly offer large updates to Nokia Messaging. I want to acknowledge specifically the omission of HTML in this release – we have spent plenty of time figuring out the best way to implement HTML and we are close to delivering it, but not in this release. It’s an important feature to us.

Finally, though we’re graduating from Beta Labs today, I will continue to be listening to your feedback and keeping up the dialogue. You will be able to find future postings from me regarding Nokia Messaging at the S60 Living blog. I will continue to read and reply to emails sent to nokiaemail [at] nokia [dot] com. As always, thanks for your feedback. Enjoy the holidays and the new release of Nokia Messaging!

– Davis Fields

Nokia Messaging

(Via Nokia Beta Labs blog.)

Nokia Messaging – Nokia World 2008 Announcement

Looks like Nokia Email is coming out of beta!

I hope all the new functionality is available on old phones!

Nokia Messaging – Nokia World 2008 Announcement: “

Written by Davis Fields, Nokia Email service Nokia Messaging team

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Hello beta testers!

It’s Davis Fields, coming to you live from Barcelona from the Nokia World conference where we officially announced Nokia Messaging – the complete messaging solution for Nokia devices. For all the official information regarding what Nokia Messaging is, please check out the press release.

I’d like to give our faithful beta users more information. What we called Nokia Email service is now the S60 email portion of the overall Nokia Messaging solution. Nokia Messaging will be the best way to use your existing email and instant messaging accounts on all Nokia devices. There is a significant update of Nokia Messaging coming out in the next two weeks – containing a lot of exciting new features, including significant performance increases in client performance and battery life.

Please check out David Dueblin’s post below on the exciting launch of Mail on Ovi as well. Nokia Messaging will seamlessly access Mail on Ovi accounts just like other email accounts, offering the same great features. Users can use their ovi.com email address to sign up for Nokia Messaging and access their email through Nokia Messaging on their Nokia phones.

I’ll post plenty more information regarding Nokia Messaging when we post our next update on http://email.nokia.com. We look forward to improving upon Nokia Email service with a complete email and instant messaging solution in Nokia Messaging.

– Davis Fields

(Via Nokia Beta Labs blog.)

Introducing Nokia Map Loader for Mac

Wahey. Nokia are really putting effort into supporting Macs for their phones. The Nokia Beta Lab has just announced a Map loader for the Mac (Nokia Maps). OK Nokia Maps is not a great app, but it’s not bad, and it’s free, and beats Google Maps on minimising data usage, since you can download all the maps via this app!

Introducing Nokia Map Loader for Mac: “

Guest writer: Steve A, the product manager of Map Loader for Mac

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Hello

I am pleased to announce the beta-release of Map Loader for Mac 1.0. It allows you to load Maps to your device via your Mac, rather than over the air. Particularly useful if you are planning on travelling to a new area you are unfamiliar with. Save on that phone bill.

Background
We get a lot of feedback through the existing application, Nokia Multimedia Transfer, for all sorts of features and one of the requested items has been a Map Loader for the Mac. So we have worked away to bring out version 1.0. In terms of functionality it is similar to the Map Loader for PC 1.0 but with a definite Mac look and feel. We also wanted to give our Mac users, something extra, so we have added one feature we are hope you will find useful, a history feature.

Compatibility
You will need a device that can run Nokia Maps. See maps.nokia.com for more information. You can also check the compatibility list for Map Loader for Mac. You will also need to install Nokia Multimedia Transfer if you haven’t already www.nokia.com/mac/multimediatransfer.

Getting started
Firstly make sure you have a memory card installed in your device, unless it is a product like N95-8GB with built in memory. Run the Maps application on your device. Once you have done this, you can connect your device to your internet connected Mac using your USB cable. If you are using Nokia Multimedia Transfer to transfer music etc, it is best to wait for this to finish transferring. Then launch Map Loader for Mac. You can then drag and drop various maps elements such as countries to your device. And the history feature? Well not groundbreaking, but it lets you see what you have transferred, and you can use it to reload the same set of maps as a later date.

Giving feedback
You can send feedback via the application itself, or Nokia Multimedia Transfer, or add a comment to this blog post. We look forward to hearing what you think. Ideas may not make the final 1.0 version, but could appear in a future update. Also fairly soon we will have an update to Nokia Multimedia Transfer which should improve the performance of the Nokia Map Loader for Mac.

One more thing…
I am sure there is another Steve who uses that phrase. Please keep all the Mac feedback coming. We do listen and hope to offer more solutions in the future

Enjoy – Steve and all who have contributed in the development of this product.

(Via Nokia Beta Labs blog.)

Major update for Nokia Email service

Nokia Beta labs have released an update for Nokia (push) email. Sounds very promising! I’m especially pleased by deleting email on the server, and also able to add more than a single email account. Both of these I’d sent in feedback about. Cool!

Major update for Nokia Email service: see your suggestions coming to life: “

Guest writer: Davis Fields, Nokia Email service team

Hello Beta Labs!

Today, the Nokia Email service team is proud to announce the first updated beta release. Nokia Email service is designed for Nokia device owners to make mobile email easily discovered and intuitive. Since we launched on August 8th, we’ve received thousands of questions, suggestions and positive feedback about Nokia Email service. We’re pleased to say that we’ve taken four of the most popular feedback requests from our users and implemented them in this release.

  • Localization. We’re now localized into six different languages, including full support for international characters, which has been a very popular request from our beta testers from all around the world. This release localized in English, Finnish, German, Dutch, Latin American Spanish and Iberian Spanish.
  • More email addresses. Now Nokia Email lets you get mail from up to 6 email addresses, each in its own mailbox yet all in one place, and makes composing from any account seamless.
  • More phones. Nokia Email service is available on more of the most popular Nokia S60 devices, including many of the latest S60 3.2 devices like the N96 and the N78.
  • Better mailbox management. When you delete an email on your Nokia phone, it will be deleted from your email account. We’ve enabled this for both IMAP and POP accounts.

If your request is not on this list, that doesn’t mean we’re not working on it. For instance, the bug where messages didn’t appear in the sent folder has been fixed (messages will now appear in the sent folder after they have been sent). One area I want to highlight that we’re working on is Google-Apps hosted email. The setup is currently not working correctly for Google Apps and similarly hosted domains (where the email address domain is different than the mail server domains). We are aware of this and are working diligently to implement those accounts in future releases.

Again, keep the feedback coming in, and we hope you enjoy this new version.

– Davis Fields

(Via Nokia Beta Labs blog.)

Nokia push email beta service

I’ve just started using the beta of the Nokia push email service. Seems fairly good, and reliable. It works for any IMAP/POP3 email account. Basically it takes your account details, then the server at Nokia logs on to the POP3/IMAP server and checks your email for you. If you have any email it then pushes it to your phone. I’m not quite sure how it works for SMTP sending. Perhaps this is done directly from the phone, as I see no advantage to doing this via the Nokia server. A pretty simple concept, and as long as you trust Nokia with your email account then it’s a good one.

You do need a decent data plan though as it keeps an open data connection at all times. I guess most push email services do the same. That’s bad if you are in a non3G area as any phone call will interrupt the data connection.

The main downside I think is that it seems to ignore the read status of my email. That’s bad for me as my mail is accessed via imap by two other clients (Evolution on Linux and Mail.app on OS X). So reading on one does not propagate this to the others. A related issue is that it also does not delete emails on the server. Which in hindsight is good as I never realised that the default setting is to delete email over 2 days old. I could have lost a lot of email there 🙂 Anybody who uses POP3 only will not care about these, but as a purely IMAP mail person, it’s a step backwards.

Another limitation is that you can only have a single account being pushed. That’s a limitation which I hope is lifted when it goes properly live.

Otherwise it seems fairly reliable. The client looks quite flashy, and I guess is the future of S60’s interface. Big bold, almost iPhoney icons, and lots of animation.

If you want push email for a Nokia phone I would recommend it. It’s also free at the moment. I doubt it will be when it’s released.