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A couple of days ago I wrote about Nokia Labs which recently released a beta version of a new email client for Symbian S60. It’s definitely much better than the standard one integrated into any Nokia phone and I’m pretty sure it’s something any Nokia power user was always looking for. You can use it with many public ISPs only while corporate accounts are not allowed yet.

I’m personally using it on my Nokia N95 and, as a power user of Gmail for S60, I started wondering what the better solution to manage my emails on my Nokia phone could be. I use Gmail as my primary account, forwarding all my company emails there, so I configured the Nokia client with Gmail and immediately got to some interesting conclusions I’d like to share.

Email retrieval

With Gmail for mobile you have to manually download your emails, pressing the “refresh” button on the main screen. On the contrary you can configure the Nokia client in different ways: push email or periodic retrievals (hourly etc.). Push email is very useful for anyone who wants to feel like a Blackberry owner and in my opinion it is the main innovation Nokia brought to its customers (there are other solutions, though). In addition to this, the Nokia client automatically loads when you turn your phone on, so you immediately receive your emails straight on your phone without having to open the client first.

Inbox

The inbox of the Gmail client looks similar to the web version. Navigating through your emails is a very fast process as well as opening a message. In addition the interface is clean and easy to use. There are some widely used functionalities that are easily accessible from some keyboard shortcuts, like deleting (7), starring (*) or replying (4) a message (and many others features too). On my N95 you can see almost six email headlines all at once in the inbox view, not bad but neither too much for me.

Nokia’s Inbox is more similar to the Outlook one instead (i.e., to a traditional email client in general). You can see ten headlines at least (very useful) and when you highlight a message more space to show the subject is made available in the message list. You can order your emails by date, subject, sender, flag, priority and attachment and choose what field to be shown in the list view (messages are grouped by date, too). Keyboard shortcuts are also available and some actions can be performed directly from the message list, like replying to a message (in Gmail you need to open it first). There is also a useful contextual menu that can be activated by pressing and holding the “enter” button in your phone when a message is highlighted.

My choice? I prefer the Nokia’s approach, but the Gmail’s one still remains very clean and usable for most users.

View Pane

The threaded view of Gmail is something I find very useful in the web version but navigating the emails in the mobile version is not that easy, in particular when the thread is very long. Moreover there are some actions you can’t do, like copying some text to paste it in other applications, viewing the quoted text in a reply to another message as well as many links within the message are not clickable.

The approach of the Nokia client is more traditional but, in my opinion, much more usable. When I reply to a message the original text is easily accessible and all the actions mentioned above can be easily done. I think the Nokia client is, again, the winner against Gmail.

Compose Pane

No comparison, the Nokia client is again more complete and offers the final user a more extended set of features than the Gmail one. Add the ability to use your phone’s internal address book (mine is usually synced among my Macbook, N95 and Gmail), something you can’t do on Gmail, and it turns out the Gmail compose window is too poor for any email heavy user user.

Battery

The downside of using a push email client on your phone is that it drains your battery very quickly, especially if you receive, like me, a lot of emails. At the same time if you choose to sync your email manually, then you can save battery and it looks like the two email clients perform alike. Alternatively there is a very useful option by which you can tell the client to disable sync when battery is lower than 20% or 5%. Anyway most power business users wouldn’t renounce to the push email feature, so battery still remains a problem for the Nokia client, hopefully to be sorted out in the near future.

Connection

Something I found annoying with the Nokia client is that you have to choose the data connection you want to use once for all in the settings section. If you want to change it, the client needs to authenticate again in order to work properly. With the Gmail client instead you can choose your favorite connection anytime you open the client. For both clients I’d have preferred the ability to choose my profile so that I can easily switch from my home/office wifi connection to the 3G one while I am on the go.

Flags

Both on Thunderbird and Mail.app on my Macbook when I flag an email using IMAP, the correspondent email is “starred” in Gmail. I find this feature particularly useful since I use to read a message on the mobile version and, if it is important, to apply a star to read it  later. I can do that with Gmail mobile as well while unfortunately flags are not synched when I apply them to a message in the Nokia email client. For me this is a must-have so I hope this feature will be added in future releases of the client.

Bugs

I just want to highlight one bug for each of the clients. Gmail: the more you use Gmail for mobile v1.5, the more it becomes unstable and takes too much time to load. After one week of heavy usage, it could take more than one minute to load. Very bad.

Speaking about Nokia instead, the most annoying bug I found out is that anytime it loads, it turns the “standby mode” on even if you turned it off (i.e., the overlaying menu’ on your screen, something I usually turn off in any Nokia phone).

Price

While Gmail is completely free of charge, the subscription fee of the Nokia one is still unknown. We have to think that Nokia is not offering an email client only, but a push email service strictly tied with the client, so that I expect a fee very similar to that they are already charging for the Nokia Navigator. Is it fair? I think yes, and users will decide if it’s worth it.

Conclusion

Both client are very usable and the interface is clean and fast in each of them. At the same time, I have to say I’m loving the new Nokia client, especially because it seems Google is not investing into the Gmail for mobile too much, leaving some useful features out of the client and they still haven’t solved some very annoying bugs which afflict the latest v1.5 of the software.

If only Nokia would add the synchronization of flags, this client would be almost perfect for me. Nokia Labs, can you hear me?

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Technorati Tags: E-mail client, gmail, luca filigheddu, Nokia, Nokia N95, push email, S60 platform