Consumers using Yahoo! Mail, Windows Live Hotmail, Gmail and AOL accounts will have support for push updates from those services to their handset, with their mailboxes integrated into the regular messaging application on your smartphone. We'll have a closer look at the capabilities of the client and the integration in the near future here on All About Symbian.
Access to your IM accounts will also be available, likely using technology from Oz Communications, who Nokia recently acquired.
One thing to note is that Nokia are talking about a commercial launch in 8 territories (Australia, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Singapore, Spain and the UK, with selected other countries to follow) so there are likely to be some elements of Nokia Messaging that will be 'premium' services. Files on Ovi is also a chargeable service, so there is some precedent for this.
Mail for Ovi will provide a web-based environment to manage all your mail accounts alongside your handset. There will be 1GB of storage for all users, and you will be able to access your paired accounts (eg GMail) from the Ovi web site.
Corporate Messaging is also taken care, of with updated clients for Exchange and Lotus Notes. Integrating into the S60 mail client as additional mailboxes, Mail for Exchange will be available for all N series and E series devices, while Lotus will include their client with new Domino servers.
Alongside the other announcements today, including the Nokia N97, the vision of Ovi is now starting to be backed up in a practical sense, with the traditional PIM data being synced over the air, music and gaming available via on-device clients, and now your connection to others, via mail and IM, can also be included in the cloud that is Ovi.
Nokia have taken time to present this vision, it's now time to see if users are going to pick it up and run with it.
Update: Nokia Beta Labs have posted a YouTube video of Mail for Ovi in action, here it is....
-- Ewan Spence, Dec 2008
