Oz upgrading to smartphone email

Email on the smartphone has traditionally been the domain of Research in Motion and Microsoft, but consumer email provider Oz believes their monopolies in the push email market are ending. Oz isn’t tackling the enterprise email market, though. Instead it’s targeting the growing number of smartphone users that don’t hail from the corporate world but still want to access push email’s functionality: small- and home-business users and particularly consumers.

Oz today unveiled SmartMail, the next evolution of its consumer email platform, which incorporates many enterprise functions into what is essentially a client that accesses portal-based email such as that offered by Yahoo, Google or a hosted business service. Unlike previous Oz mail iterations, which basically used a rich client to render a Web-based email portal, SmartMail allows for on-device storage of mail, the downloading and rendering of attachments and real-time “push” synchronization with the email account—all services common to enterprise email applications but rare in consumer applications.

“The experience is very similar to the email experience on the desktop,” said Michel Besner, senior vice president of marketing for Oz. He added that as Oz starts working more closely with handset designers and delves further into phone operating systems, it will be able to integrate the client into other applications, including the phone’s address book.

Though Oz announced the availability of the SmartMail suite today, it has already landed a customer. Verizon Wireless has been deploying the SmartMail client on many of its smartphones in the last few months, including the Motorola Q line and the Palm Treo and its recent HTC smartphones.