[davidlove]

Having noticed that Voda are starting to promote Vodafone Business Email, which appears to be a more handset generic alternative push email solution to the trusty but proprietary BlackBerry Connect, I called CS to see if I could add VBE to my Anytime tariff.

There are two flavours of VBE, Personal and Enterprise. But apparently, unless your employer has the latter, ie MS Exchange running on a suitable corporate server, it's not really push at all, but it just polls, ie "pulls" every 15 mins.

Well, my now retired 6680 could do that to a single POP3 account, without paying the £15/mth Voda are asking for their service - which (and apparently to avoid offending BlackBerry) is conveniently exactly the same price, except that BB is true "push" and supports 10 email accounts, not the single one on offer from Voda's VBE partner Visto.

I suspect many may be attracted to push email now that converged phone/PDA devices like Nokia's E61, which can be configured to support VBE, are hitting the shelves in volume.

Anyone been there, done that yet? TIA.

[IanG]

Hello,

With VBE it’s the Vodafone server, rather than your phone itself that polls for new e mails every 15 minutes, and then forwards them to your phone, so it’s a ‘push’ service in this sense.

Although you pay a monthly subscription, this means you get access to unlimited e mails, whereas if you download your e mails manually you’d have to pay GPRS charges. Depending on your usage, these charges could go far beyond the flat rate £15 per month.

Hope this info helps.

[davidlove]

Thanks for that, IanG. It seems VBE is hardly the BlackBerry killer it was cracked up to be. I suspect BB will "own" the corporate push email space for some time yet.