Synchronica plc, which provides mobile synchronization and device management solutions, has revealed that its award-winning Mobile Gateway 3.0 now also supports Push Email using the Open Mobile Alliance Electronic Mail Notification (OMA EMN) standard. This will encourage more operators to make mobile Push Email available to the consumer market, says Synchronica, by enabling more economical delivery of industry-standard mobile email to the estimated 1.3 billion IMAP-compatible (Internet Message Access Protocol) phones already owned by consumers.
The LEMONADE (License to Enhanced Mobile Oriented and Diverse Endpoints) standard was established by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to improve the user experience and usability of Email on mobile devices. The LEMONADE group promotes open standards such as IMAP IDLE and OMA EMN, which are platform-independent, and therefore designed to support email on the widest range of mobile devices.
For ISPs and ASPs, the LEMONADE IMAP IDLE standard is rapidly emerging as the preferred mechanism for delivering Push Email to standard mobile phones, says Synchronica, because it works independently of the operator.
From an operator perspective, OMA EMN is more attractive than IMAP IDLE, because a mobile phone using OMA EMN does not require a constant connection to the server, and so demands less resource on the mobile network infrastructure and has less impact on the battery life. Instead OMA EMN uses SMS messaging to alert the mobile device that new mail has arrived.
From a user perspective, Synchronica says, by adding support for the OMA EMN standard, it has created a major opportunity for operators to offer mobile Push Email to the mass market, because consumers can use the service on standard mobile phones, right out of the box.
According to mobile industry analyst Visiongain, the market for consumer mobile email is set to grow dramatically from 8 million in 2007 to 36 million in 2008, with 184 million consumer mobile email accounts anticipated by 2011.
Synchronicas support for both OMA EMN and IMAP IDLE enables the vendor to address both sides of the mobile email delivery market. Synchronica believes this growth is likely to be seen first in the emerging and rapidly-adopting markets of Eastern Europe, Africa, Middle-East, Asia, and Latin America, where PC penetration is low and traditional telecommunications infrastructure is limited, but where mobile phones are seeing high growth rates. Synchronica predicts that in these markets, the mobile phone could become the primary form of accessing email, opening an attractive data revenue potential for operators in these regions.
Our unique zero-footprint architecture and commitment to open industry standards is key to successfully targeting the consumer market, particularly in emerging markets, with mobile Push Email,” says Synchronica CEO, Carsten Brinkschulte. Most mobile email solutions today are based on proprietary protocols, requiring users to download additional client software. This approach is set to fail in the consumer market, where the overwhelming majority are using Feature Phones that cannot use proprietary clients. Approaches using a Java ME client theoretically work on Feature Phones, but provide an inferior user experience compared to built-in clients and are therefore less likely to be adopted.”
Mobile Gateway 3.0 provides carrier-grade scalability, with load balancing and failover and runs on any J2EE application server using Solaris, Linux, or Windows servers. It supports IMAP/SMTP for email and includes support for both IMAP IDLE and OMA EMN industry standards for Push Email. In addition, it includes support for SyncML (OMA DS) for synchronization of calendar, contacts, notes, and tasks. For service activation, it features a provisioning module (OMA CP), enabling over-the-air configuration of the built-in IMAP/SMTP and SyncML clients.
The combination of IMAP/SMTP and SyncML standards allows Synchronica to deliver Push Email and calendar/contact synchronization to mass market Feature Phones, representing more than 80% of devices in use today, as well as high-end Smartphones in use in the business market. All these services can be delivered without requiring any additional client to be installed on the device. Synchronicas Mobile Gateway 3.0 also includes back-end support for popular Email services such as Gmail or AOL, as well as enterprise systems such as Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Domino. 
