Wireless Carriers Bet on Mobile Mail
Business 2.0: The Radicati Group, a Palo Alto-based market research firm, predicts that nearly 123 million consumers will check e-mail on their handsets by 2009, up from just 6.5 million this year. At an eye-popping growth rate of more than 100 percent a year, Radicati expects mobile e-mail to become a $2 billion market in just four years. If mobile e-mail becomes a multibillion-dollar market, it will prove that in the wireless world, it’s the applications that are simplest to use that make the most money.
This is absolutly crucial. Yet propietary protocols and lack of interopability between cell phone “browsers” and corporations locking down their email, I hope this would change, but we could only hope.
Mobile email is essential. I recently got rid of my blackberry (too expensive and too bulky) and picked up a Sony Ericsson K750 (awesome phone, much better in the pocket than the RIM). I found the built in email client kind of limiting so I tried a couple JAVA apps out there and eventually settled on http://www.movamail.com , it works really well. I’d definitely suggest it.
Given the 33,000 Blackberry enterprise server and the 5,000 Good servers currently deployed this seems quite a reasonable estimate..
At present Seven has nearly 100 carriers suppporting their phone-first email client, visto has fewer carriers but has also been there for some time and microsoft has just really entered the fray.. and blackberry is realizing that licensing it’s solution to other handset players is key to fending off th emicrosoft onslaught..
Given the 1.4B mobile devices currently capable of mobile messaging via SMS, and the prediction that all mobile phones will be mobile-email capable in 3 years it seems very palitable that more and more mobile users will be accessing email.. fo most of us, it has gone mobile like the phone because email has become a primary communication form.. with Many of us getting more emails each day then phone calls..
I much prefer sharing a theatre or resturant with a mobile email user than a mobile phone user! They don’t interrupt my experience when they get a message!