The iPhone does e-mail but up until now I have resisted the temptation to get connected to my e-mail on any type of mobile device. Why? Because I don’t want the pressure of dealing with stuff when I am out and about on serious work (usually travelling to, and meeting with clients).
Like many knowledge workers I find the constant stream of e-mails distracting at least, massively counter productive at most. Even on my desktop workstation I set Outlook to send and receive only when I tell it to. Sometimes I can go for hours without pressing the send/receive button, but those hours are usually massively productive. Some knowledge workers I know feel rejected if they don’t get an e-mail every 10 mins. As you can imagine they are ‘extroverts’ in the Jungian sense (see MBTI).
So, as I write I have 36 e-mails on my iPhone. At least I have 36 mail headers. To actually read an e-mail you just have to tap the header and it then retrieves the whole message from the server, attachments included. The resolution of the screen makes e-mails actually quite readable – even HTML e-mails look good and you can zoom in to read text and at reasonable size (the iPhone handles zooming in to read stuff extremely well – works on e-mails, web sites, and also on attached files). The iPhone’s ability to display portrait or landscape also makes reading e-mail much more viable. Its ability to display native files such as PowerPoint is also really impressive – once again the zoom works well and it’s possible to get a good flavour of a document for a basic review for example. Clearly you can’t make any edits but as a review tool it works pretty well.
The iPhone also supports multiple e-mail accounts (including Exchange, GMail, Yahoo and AOL). With Yahoo Mail (and only Yahoo) you also get push e-mail (when an e-mail hits your inbox it is immediately sent to your iPhone too). The iPhone doesn’t offer a fully synchronised mail environment like the Blackberry but as an occasional mobile e-mail monitoring device it works really well.
Actually when I was investigating the way the iPhone does e-mail I learned a lot more about mail services such as POP3 and IMAP. We will look into this further in an article on Smartworking.
Sending e-mails is pretty straightforward. It can also pick up contacts from the contacts database.
Managing e-mails is pretty intuitive too. If you delete an e-mail on the iPhone it gets deleted on the server. If you leave it it will be downloaded to your desktop mail client next time you access your mail from your PC. I use Outlook 2007 so I delete all the junk and the less important work stuff. The more important e-mails I leave for downloading to my PC and filing in Outlook. Once this is done a quick tap of the ‘refresh’ button on the iPhone clears all the old e-mails. Clearly this is a bit clunky compared to the synchronisation features provided by Blackberries but the extra functionally of the Blackberry brings with it some extra complexity in terms of set-up and use – and of course you have to pay for it as well. For a simple first mobile e-mail device the iPhone works really well, is easy to set-up and in the UK at least is completely free of any additional charges over and above your standard monthly calling plan.
So will I become a mobile e-mail junkie, or a ‘crackberry’? I don’t think so. For me e-mail is a great ‘slow lane’ communications medium, if I need to communicate quickly or urgently then a phone call or a text is the best approach.
Extra - For a tongue-in-cheek insight into life as a 'crackberry' read ‘Who Moved my Blackberry?’ by Martin Lukes (and Lucy Kellaway).