Good Morning Ladies and Gentlemen,
This is your friendly Commodore 64 here to report on yet another useful, tech-improving, free service that is bound to improve any nerd's life fo sho.
This new service, which has solved a long standing problem, in my view, with send/receive, hates attachments, crappy, slow, sluggish, snap-crackle, pop3 email technology. The software is called emoze, which is a spin-off of a company called Emblaze.
We covered this service in one of our previous posts here, but now we've really gotten up close and personal.
Now we are not instant fanboys of anything or anyone here, but we are a bunch of wise(ass) admins, and we do know what's good for us, and any of our end users who are on the go, and email dependent. That person will attest to the fact that it sucks to have to send/receive on a schedule. Most people have their email send/receiving on an average of every 5 minutes, which makes for a very cumbersome convo, at best. If those convos are short and sweet, like most, they become exponentially cumbersome. So we know whats good, and after trying emoze with my corporate outlook mail, and using it's proprietary 'desktop to mobile push' clients for about a week now, we can truly say this a great service, and good for you too! Best of all, for a single end-user, the service is totally free, just the way we love it here at AskTheAdmin.
We had the pleasure of personally meeting with Neftali Shani, Chairman of Emblaze and Active Chairman of emoze, in a one on one pow-wow where we were really able to get a sense of his vision and mission for the company and the free service:
We are committed to enhancing the user experience, making emoze the world's most flexible and user-friendly push email and synchronization system...
All in all, emoze is the most efficient and effective way to keep up to date with emails, calendars, contacts and other data when on the move, no matter what mobile device or information management system you use.
We support Lotus Notes and Domino Servers, Microsoft Outlook and Exchange, POP3 and Web-Access, among others - democratizing push email and data for consumers and businesses alike.
The emoze program installs a client on your desktop that 'listens' to any new emails coming into your Outlook running on your pc. On the mobile side, a program running on your pda/smartphone listens to what the desktop client has to say, and integrates that with an email account that looks pretty much like your other mobile email accounts - with one caveat - NO SEND/RECEIVE!
The service, while connection dependent, works pretty invisibly, though it uses it's own notification to let you know an email has come in. I'm pretty sure thats the same notification that MMS uses, but I dont get enough MMS messages to tell the difference.
Messages come through to your phone almost as instantly as they do to your outlook, so I'd have to say this service is pretty tight.
The only gripes I have involve issues that, in all fairness, might not be the fault of emoze. These issues might actually be the responsibility of the hardware or OS manufacturer. For example, when starting up the phone, the emoze client takes a little long to load, sometimes taking more than a minute to go through it's syncing process. However this is most likely due to my connection speed. Also, while tethered to my laptop via bluetooth and internet connection sharing, it seems to want precedence over my shared connection so connection speed was pretty hampered. All in all, these are problems that would likely solve themselves in time, as connection speeds make their way up. Also as more hardware manufacturers adopt the HSDPA standard, this will do away with whatever lag time the emoze client unearths.
Also worth noting is that I can't be considered the average user. My HTC Hermes/8525 has ALOT of stuff loaded on it, besides the 4gb memory card i have blazing inside. I'm pretty sure that for the average business end-user, this service would be almost completely transparent and would invisibly provide someone with exactly what emoze promises - Free Push Email For ALL!
In summary, emoze is a wonderful service. Free push email for the masses is a big undertaking but the good people over at emoze have taken it upon themselves to try to improve the democracy associated with email.
Very noble.
_ThePushyCommodore_ (yup still the one you used to play Bruce Lee on)
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