The second of today’s announcements from Nokia, the Mail on Ovi webmail service has gone live, allowing you to setup and access your username@ovi.com email address from any computer. As we know from the announcement at Nokia World, Mail on Ovi is an IMAP account, which allows you to pull it into nearly any third party mail client you wish, including Gmail, Nokia Messaging, or even Profimail. The account is free, and comes with 1GB of online storage for your email. There is also a Spam filter built-in, though we’ve yet to see just how accurate/strong it is.
You can check it out and setup your own Mail on Ovi account at http://Mail.Ovi.com. As you can see in the screenshot below, it’s standard fare, specifically if you’re familiar with Google’s Gmail service. You can organize your mail into folders with an easy-to-use drag and drop setup, and you can setup a signature, or even an auto-responder, for when you go on vacation.
As Steve Litchfield at AllAboutSymbian.com points out, Mail on Ovi is certainly not designed to compete with the likes of Gmail, Hotmail, or similar webmail services. Rather, it’s designed to offer folks who have no email address (believe it or not, they *do* exist) a way to get an email address, and access it from their computer. Currently S40 phones can even setup a Mail.Ovi.com email account right from their phone, and there’s no doubt the ability will come to S60 soon.
What has me excited, though, is the potential this brings, specifically when seen with other Ovi services. With Sync on Ovi, we can view our contacts, calendars, and notes on any computer, and backup/restore them to any phone. While the Mail on Ovi and Sync on Ovi contact lists are not yet sync’d, it’s only a matter of time. I’m definitely anxious to see some integration happening within Ovi.
As a side note, I noticed that, when logged into the Mail.Ovi.com webmail, the top banner says, ‘Ovi Labs’, rather than ‘Beta’ or ‘Beta Labs’. Interesting. Here’s a video of the whole shebang:
