SPRINT BOOSTS E-MAIL; CINGULAR'S GOT GAME

Notable among several carrier data announcements at last week's CTIA Wireless IT and Entertainment show were Sprint's upgrades to its PCS Business Connection service and Cingular Wireless' new mobile gaming titles, partnerships and inter-carrier and multi-player gaming capability.

Sprint's new capabilities will improve access to corporate and personal e-mail, said Phil Bowman, vice president of business marketing with the PCS division of Sprint.

The new features come from the carrier's relationship with Seven, which supplied its System Seven mobile enterprise platform to Sprint. The features include ability to open attachments; a Pocket PC device client that provides two-way wireless synchronization of corporate e-mail with Pocket Outlook; a Palm client for the Treo 600 from Handspring enabling “push e-mail” synchronization and offline access; access to multiple in-boxes on a single device including one corporate mailbox and up to two Internet-based mailboxes; full POP3 support for access to personal e-mail accounts; the ability to automatically detect and install software updates over the air; and background synchronization so users can access other Palm applications while their device is synching.

“We're supporting access to business e-mail for the masses, not for the top 15 people in your company,” Bowman said. “The executives can afford to give access to everyone in their companies for $10 a month.”

A new behind-the-firewall version of PCS Business Connection, Enterprise Edition Server Solution will launch in the fourth quarter. It will enable customers to deploy the mobile service on their own server and manage it behind a corporate firewall.

In other show news, Cingular increased the number of mobile gaming titles, partners and devices it is offering, and also announced an inter-carrier gaming capability, which will allows customers of different carriers to play each other.

Cingular's mobile gaming sales have doubled since the carrier introduced gaming last year, said Rob Hyatt, executive director of data product management at Cingular. “We love the wireless pure-play game developers whose games you can only access on our network, but we also see the benefit of game developers who are creating games across all media,” he said.

The company's gaming partners include Digital Bridges, JAMDAT Mobile, Mforma, Moviso (acquired last week by InfoSpace, see story page 9), THQ Wireless and Tira Wireless to provide games from a variety of genres. Cingular also claims to have more handsets capable of downloading games — 20 — than any other national wireless service provider.