It has been a while since my last proper geek post, so I just have to do one to balance the 'force'.
After the saga I had with getting Blackberry Connect to work with my E61, I was more or less given up on push email on my phone. I've been getting emails via POP and IMAP but the native email client on E61 sucks at dealing with lost connection/reconnection. Once it detects a data connection is lost, the automatic retrieval schedule will be switched off and requires to be switched on again manually. WTF?
But thanks to e-series.org blog, I've found Mail2Web last week. It's a free Exchange mail service and the best thing about it (apart from being free) is that they also expose the mobile synchronisation URL so once I installed Mail for Exchange on my E61, I was able to get push email on my phone. Moreover, Mail for Exchange works just fine with spotty connection. It will just reconnection, re-sync without any complaints. The only downside with it is that it drains battery slightly faster than the native clients since it is pretty 'chatty' with the Exchange server and thus uses a bit of juices. Not a big deal since I have chargers at home and at the office but it may be a big deal for some people.
Lost in Colonisation 
Okay, so you're the only person on Vox I've been able to find who uses (used?) an e61 . . . Don't really have much to add, but do you still use it or have you moved on to something cooler (as you haven't seemed to have posted any e61 tagged post since November)? Oh, yeah, btw, I too have had issues with IMAP and push. My email provider/host uses the IMAP-idle command so I essentially had free push email, but for whatever reason, the e61 would drop the connection totally randomly. I now use Google Apps for Your Domain for email, so am stuck with POP anyway..
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Oh yeah, I am still using my E61, at least until the iPhone is out! I haven't blogged about the phone since Nov because not much has happened since then. This phone 'just works', unlike the stupid Treo 650 I used to have 😀
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Yeah, many people who actually tried E61 agree that it is one of the best business phone at the moment.
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I too had the problems you report with your E61. It would loose the
GPRS connection and disable the automatic retrieval, which does suck.
I use IMAP IDLE in order to have "push" on my phone and can report
other issues with that, mostly the client getting stuck while trying to
retrieve a message and then after a while something that looked like a
quick reboot would happen, only I wouldn't be able to go into the
Messaging application anymore and had to manually do a real reboot of
the phone. This would happen anywhere from 1 to 10 times a day and it
was quite annoying. In hopes of having all these issues gone, I
recently upgraded to the E61i and I can sadly report that all the same
problems are still there. It seems they didn't work on any of these
for Symbian 9.1a.I once tried mail2web and it does work OK, but
that would also force me to change my e-mail address, which is not a
real solution or even workaround. Yes, I can have my real address
forwarded to my mail2web address, but when I reply, the message would
come from my mail2web address and that's the one people would reply
to. Like I said, not really a choice.I'm pretty disappointed, mostly on the IMAP implementation on this phone. :(Have you found any alternatives to all this?
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Sorry Razor, I've since upgraded to the iPhone and not worried about push mail anymore 🙂
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Oh, I too bought the iPhone and then had to sell it. I couldn't deal with the keyboard (I e-mail and text a lot, so I need the larger keyboard with the tactile feedback, i.e. real sprung keys), but, more than anything, with the lack of real multi-tasking. On my E61i, I will have 3-4 applications open at the same time at any given point, and I switch back and forth. For example, I am instant messaging with someone and I will launch one of my web browsers (I have 4 installed) to look something up or my e-mail to get some information on there that I need to rely to the person I'm messaging with. iPhone no go for me, unfortunately, cause it sure is cool. My next attempt at an iPhone-like phone will be the Meizu M8/miniOne when it comes out before the end of the year (http://www.engadget.com/tag/m8).
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The iPhone definitely is not a business phone. In fact, probably not even a power user phone. It is a very nice consumer phone and I don't know why the media or the blogsphere keeps comparing it with other business smartphones.
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One of the reasons I think this happens is because of Apple's own marketing campaign. (Or is it AT&T's campaign?) Why would they make a commercial where someone says, "Now I can have my contacts, e-mail and music all on one device" when this has been true about many devices for a long time? People will believe Apple just came up with the idea. Or include a signature as silly as "Sent from my iPhone" as default in all e-mails in order to immitate BlackBerries? That will definitely make people believe of the iPhone as a power phone. It's not. It's just supremelly cool with a very capable camera. Sell it for what it is.
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