In an earlier blog posting Steve noted that IMAP is the ideal standard for mobile messaging and that even as it stands today (without the LEMONADE functionality which we and others are working on) does a good job of delivering a satisfactory mobile messaging experience to the end user.
One of the main stumbling blocks to the widespread adoption of this standard for mass-market mobile email has been the relatively poor quality of the email clients shipped with the mobile devices that people use.
I know that with my last phone (a Sony Ericsson T610) the shipped email client, whilst theoretically usable, was pretty useless in practice and talking to colleagues at Isode and friends, that seems to be a common judgement on phone email clients.
However, good IMAP clients for phones are available as third-party add-ons, one great example being Profimail which I'm now using on my new Nokia N70 (the standard client shipped with the phone is, again, pretty terrible).
Profimail (which is available as a demo download from the author's site) does pretty much everything I want from a mobile client and looks good.
If the authors choose to add Lemonade support as the Lemonade features are finalised, Profimail would be a great recommended client for mail service providers to point their users to in order to complete an open standards based mobile messaging offering based on a Lemonade compliant IMAP message store like Isode's own M-Box.
I'm surprised that a mobile phone manufacturer hasn't already either bought the program outright or at least asked them to whitebox the product so they can ship it directly with their phones, it would give them quite an edge over the competition.
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