Its no surprise that I’m a fan of technology (though in all honesty it should scare the beejeebies out of me) and especially of mobile phones of the smartphone variety, currently switching back and forth between the (somewhat aged) blackberry pearl and nokia n73 phones.
Blackberry internet service (which is the only way a consumer outside of a corporate BES environment can use a blackberry) is woefully inadequate for any power user, and severely cripples the functionality of the blackberry in the first place, lacking online calendar, contact, note, and task synchronization, and lets not forget that the “push” e-mail is rather a laugh, in that its not bi-directional, and doesn’t keep messages in sync on the device and the server.
The Nokia standard IMAP implementation is great for e-mail, its already a web standard, gmail works with it, and it supports idle for push e-mail too, but that’s about it. There’s still no easily acessible online calendar, notes, task, contacts syncing without paying a third party service for either microsoft exchange accounts or to translate the standard syncml into proprietary online formats.
Anyway, the real point of this article is that I don’t understand why Google hasn’t integrated their online apps into a groupware suite of sorts. For consumers, it would dominate the market. There would be no choice, you have a phone that will automatically sync your calendar, your contacts, tasks, and pushes your gmail down to your phone without needing to be connected or synced to a desktop.
Come on nokia and google, you can do it.
I want a nokia n-series phone with a QWERTY keyboard, 5mp camera with xenon flash, wifi, gps, and the latest software, and then I want google to implement syncml for all their apps so as to facilitate push calendar, contacts, etc.
I’m there.
