Comparison of Gmail mobile and the built-in email client on Nokia phones
More and more people use their mobile phones to keep on tracking their emails. When I was still using my Motorola E680i, I had already tried different third party mobile email client based on J2ME, such as Morange, Flurry, Gmail mobile and so on. Among those third party mobile email software, I used Gmail mobile mostly since it was more reliable though it only supported Gmail account while Morange and Flurry supported multiple email accounts from Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail and others.
Since I lost the Motorola E680i, I started to use Nokia Symbian smartphones, which had built-in email client. I used both the mobile version of Gmail and the built-in email client since either of them has advantage and disadvantage.
The built-in email client has better integration with the system. It can be access under the same menu of SMS/MMS. When your are using the multimedia browser, the file manager and many other system applications, you have the option to send image, music, video or notes directly without the step to attach them to a new email. The built-in email client also uses less RAM than the Gmail mobile (about the half). More important, it uses less battery (also about the half), which is crucial to mobile devices.
The built-in email client can support any POP3 or IMAP4 email account. I am using IMAP4 to access my Gmail account since it provides more control. The new email arriving my Gmail account will be delivered to my Nokia phone within less than one minutes as it works in a way similar to IP push. It also provides more flexibility to only retrieve the head of the email content and let user to decide to whether the rest part, which can include big attachments will be downloaded. User also can choose which sub-folders of the email box to be retrieve.
However, the built-in email client will only keeps limited amount of emails from the user’s account and doesn’t have the powerful search email feature providing by Gmail mobile. It is only possible to sort emails by sender, date or subject.
Except the search email feature, which is very useful to find necessary information, Gmail mobile also let users have direct preview of common attachment formats, while it doesn’t provide the possibility to download or send attachments. And sometimes there is some delay of new emails to be retrieved.
[...] or other documents on your Java-enabled phone. What you need are a Gmail account and install the Gmail mobile (based on Java ME) on your phone. Forward the email contained the document or send a new email with [...]