:: Accessing Outlook via wireless (from O2)::
A subject of ongoing trial and error, wireless email is still taking its time to become useful. Having spent a lot of effort myself designing different systems for enterprise usage, this latest product from O2 is somewhat familiar in concept. It is based on the idea of leaving your desktop running so that a proxy system - in this case from Seven - can access your actual email account using Outlook as the programming interface so that the wireless interaction is with the actual Outlook data and not a copy of it. O2's licensed version is called xmail and it has been optimised for the XDA. However, it works with any browser (not that many have been tested though apparently) and is available to non-O2 customers (though there is a note that this may one day become O2-users only).
The service costs 9.99 (GBP) per month (excluding airtime), but there is a 10-day trial to see if you like it before paying. I downloaded the trial and it installed smoothly.
I accessed my Outlook information from Internet Explorer first of all and that seemed to work well. This in itself is a very handy feature - I now have webmail for my actual account (including all legacy data already sitting in my Outlook PIM database).
The big disappointment however was accessing the system via WAP from my T68i, which does not seem to be supported as I can't get past the log-in screen despite correctly entering my credentials. Having designed WAP email systems before, I have seen this problem many times and it is indicative of poor testing, but then this is a problem that plagues WAP designers - the shear number of devices to test against, which is a necessity even if the browser is licensed from a 3rd party and supposed to behave consistently across all phones (which they don't).
It did work via Eudora Web browser running on my Palm (with Bluetooth back to the T68i). The problem I am experiencing though is poor performance, seemingly because the SSL processing on the Palm is slow, at least in the Eudora implementation, so I am going to try another browser.
A nice feature is that a documents folder can be chosen to be accessible via the browser interface so that attachments can be added. This could be something like "My Documents" for example. However, as with all programs that interface with Outlook, folders and multiple accounts is always a problem, so neither are supported here. That means that I only get to see messages in my Inbox and is problematic for my VIP messages that are routed to folders. So what do I do? Should I turn off my folder routing in order to benefit from this product, or should I make do with the compromise? The only other alternative is to switch to a more sophisticated system like Blackberry, but I'm not interested in a proprietary device as I already have a Palm with Bluetooth cradle. If anything, I would move to something like a P800 if I was going to "trade up".
I shall see if it is worth spending the tenner a month to stick with this service. A 10-day trial is a bit limited and nothing like the standard 20-30 days used by most software vendors, but then operators are not that clued up on such things. Currently I check email from my T68i using IMAP, but I frequently leave Outlook running on my desktop anyway where it will suck down the mail every 5 minutes thus resulting in nothing being left on the server for me to view remotely. This is why I wanted to try out the xMail system. A similar product is available from Orange, who has also licensed the Seven solution. Products like this have already existed for sometime in the US market, such as from companies like Infowave.
4:29:54 PM 
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