Sprint, Cingular target consumer e-mail

Sprint and Cingular today signaled more aggressive moves into the consumer e-mail market with Sprint releasing a new Java e-mail application powered by Seven and Cingular announcing plans to begin selling the BlackBerry Pearl on Friday.

While both offerings are aimed at the so-called consumer, only Sprint’s is a truly mass-market service. Sprint is expanding its relationship with Seven for business e-mail to consumer e-mail, using a downloadable Java client that can access popular webmail and ISP e-mail services like Yahoo and AOL or any POP or IMAP account, but without sacrificing the push e-mail and synchronization capabilities that have made enterprise e-mail so popular.

While many ISPs and mail portals have offered their mail services either through the mobile browser or through clients developed by companies like Oz, most of them have fairly basic functions, akin to accessing mail through a browser on the World Wide Web. Seven’s solution, however, resembles a dedicated e-mail client such as Microsoft’s Outlook. It stores the header and first few kilobytes of each message in the phone itself, allows customers to compose e-mail offline for shipment at a later date, and synchronizes any changes or deletions with the e-mail server. Most significantly it emulates true push connectivity, using SMS as the delivery channel. While many other consumer e-mail services use SMS, they use it as a notification system to let a customer know a new message is present, which the customer must then manually retrieve over the network. Seven’s system, however, uses SMS as machine-to-machine tool--the message data is uploaded directly to the e-mail client, setting off a “new mail” alert.

“This is taking an enterprise grade e-mail experience to mass-market phones,” said Ari Backholm, vice president of marketing and product management for Seven.

The Pearl is Research in Motion’s first stab at a traditional smartphone, featuring a more traditional cellular handset form factor rather than the chunky PDA-like designs that its previous BlackBerry models. But it is hardly a mass-market device. With a suggest retail price of $350, T-Mobile--the only other U.S. carrier to carry the device--is selling it for $200 after rebates and contract subsidy. Meanwhile, Sprint’s service is technically available over in Java-enabled Vision or Nextel phone, though memory capabilities and outdated J2ME software in lower-end or older devices might restrict proliferation across its complete portfolio.

The Pearl’s capabilities, though, are much more robust. The device basically packages RIM’s market-leading BlackBerry e-mail platform in a new form-factor, giving it all of the synchronization and push capabilities of its enterprise devices packaged in a smaller form factor. Unlike its enterprise devices, which are targeted at corporations, BlackBerry seems to be focusing the Pearl on individuals, the so-called prosumers that want access to their personal and business e-mail without necessarily going through their IT departments.

The difference is easily seen in the price: Cingular’s minimum plan for e-mail access over the Pearl is $30 a month, while Sprint is offering up its consumer e-mail for free with its Vision data plans, though SMS charges apply when the service’s push capabilities are activated. Sprint’s decision to offer the service gratis seems to be a growing trend in mass-market e-mail, where customers used to getting mail from Yahoo, Hotmail and Google for free are put off by the high fees of more enterprise-oriented services. Instead Sprint and other carriers are using e-mail to drive more users to data plans, rather than making it a discreet service of its own, Backholm said.

“It’s like voicemail,” Backholm said. “Whenever you get a voice plan you get voicemail with it. If you get a data plan, it comes with e-mail.”