T-Mobile pushes consumer mail

T-Mobile is inviting UK consumers to join the pushy set by offering genuinely-pushed email to a custom client, for a small consideration of £3.50 a month.

The service connects to up to five existing email accounts and alerts the client to connect and download new messages using a silent SMS notification, in much the same way as the BlackBerry service works. Users have to download the client application, but anyone signing up will get a free month's usage before the monthly fee kicks in.

Four clients are available, though the information site is only listing support for Symbian handsets from Nokia we're assured that T-Mobile has clients available for Windows Mobile, Sony Ericsson UIQ and Nokia S40 devices too. The important thing is being able to launch the client on receipt of the SMS notification - something supported by an increasing number of Java implementations as well as native clients.

Of course, most on-phone email clients can be configured to automatically connect to the internet and download new messages every few minutes, making T-Mobile's new service redundant as it's launched. But some users won't want to bother configuring the integrated client, while others will worry about the impact on their data traffic.

The service has its very own fair-use limit, beyond which T-Mobile will slap wrists but not charge more, so the service might appeal to those knocking their data tariff limits. Still, it's hard to imagine that such heavy users would be happy sharing their email passwords with T-Mobile.

So mainly this is a service for those who want easy access to their email, or just want to pretend their communication is as important as their BlackBerry-sporting colleagues. ®