Email for Mobile Phones: Variety of Solutions will Cause Confusion

There are all sorts of solutions to mobile phone email appearing.  These include:

• The proprietary approaches from RIM and Microsoft
• Similar solutions from smaller vendors
• Offerings from Yahoo and Google/gmail
• Open standards based solutions

We saw an interesting recent review of three more offerings of a different class on the Mobilecrunch blog.

The essence of all of these is to provide a very simple interface on the phone (supported on a wide range of phones), using a backend server that connects to a variety of email systems.   One of them converts all emails to SMS (fragmenting if needed).  The other two interact with the phone using a proprietary protocol to the client that essentially downloads all waiting email. If you only get small messages, and want to read most of them, this type of solution could be useful. Users with more complex requirements will want a solution that interacts directly with their mail server.

The number of solutions appearing make clear that this is an area where things are happening fast.  This will make it very hard for users to understand and to distinguish between different approaches/products.