Nokia Email service review

Nokia have released an update of their Nokia Email application available for Symbian S60 3rd edition Nokia mobile phones using the Nokia Messaging service. Still in beta version Nokia Email is free for now and let's hope that the guys in Nokia will come to their minds and decide that it should be free after the beta period ends. The Nokia Email application allows you to add 10 POP3 email accounts through the web interface and after downloading the application on your phone to sync theese accounts so that you can read and respond to your e-mails while you are on the go.

To start using the Nokia Email application, go to email.nokia.com and register for a new account if you already don't have one. After the registration is complete you will receive via SMS the download link for the Nokia Email application as we did on our Nokia N96.

The link will open the phone browser and after downloading the Nokia Email SIS file, install it on your phone. The installation process is quick under 2 minutes on Nokia N96 and other Symbian S60 phones from that class. Once it is installed the application will show the welcome screen...

After clicking Start the Nokia Email application will try to connect to the servers for what reason I am not sure.

After contacting the server (with SMS Provisioning title, no idea why the title is this) you will be displayed the login screen where you will have to enter your Nokia Email password. Please note that this is a different password from the one for your email service. For the purpose of testing this free application (for the time being) I have added my personal GMail email address.

So we have added a GMail account into the Nokia Email application on the first screenshot above you can see the home screen with the added accounts, the Compose, Sync, Settings and Help icons. On the second screenshot you can see how the Inbox looks like. You can control what folders of each email account you will sync through the web interface of the application available at email.nokia.com!

The process of browsing and reading emails in your Inbox is very easy unlike on the older BlackBerry push service application. Some of the things are even animated like scrolling titles and expanding the email boxes.

Here is a screenshot of how reading a mail looks like, the one opened is the email from the Symbian Freeware mailing list available on our site (Tip: Subscribe to receive S60 freeware updates). The only problem was that it does not seem to show the images (although we did not play with the application settings very much but this might be something that the Nokia people should be working on).
The other screenshot is how the compose (Create new email) form looks like. It seems that it automatically adds "Sent from my Nokia phone" on the bottom of every email you send but you can delete it while writing your email message.

While playing with the settings we found out plenty of options on what to sync and when to sync and even account specific options enabling your to set different settings for each email account individually.

Although this is still a free beta version of the Nokia Email service, there are still some bugs. The one we noticed was that the application synchronized the emails with a very big delay even when we manually tried to sync it, the new email would not show up. Update: After a while everything seems to be working just right... no idea why we the first time there was a delay with the sync process.

All in all our impressions of the Nokia Email client are positive, the application looks good and works very fast and since it will become a paid service in the feature (not really sure when and how much it will cost) lets hope that things will just get better.

If you are using just GMail, I suggest that you use the Google Gmail for your Nokia mobile phone which we reviewed in an article earlier this week.