Redwood Shore, California-based Visto has worked on feature phones before, said Steve Maynard, its senior marketing manager for Europe. Our focus has been on smart phones, particularly since we have been able to do true push with the launch of our ConstantSync technology in October last year, Maynard said.
Maynard said ConstantSync represents a stage beyond either manual or IP-triggered synchronization, the former relying on the user checking in to see whether there are any new mails, while the latter is based on an SMS being sent to tell them to download new messages. It pushes mails optimized for mobile devices to phones with an always-on connection. He said Visto will be extending the smart phones on which ConstantSync is supported from about 20 today to 50 or so by mid-year.
We already support it on all major OSes and flavors, namely Palm OS, Microsoft Pocket PC and Windows Mobile Smartphone, and Symbian OS with UIQ, Series 60 and Series 80 user interfaces, but we still need to do the quality assurance testing on additional handsets, he said. There are also plans to add functions such as Tasks and additional Calendar capabilities to ConstantSync later this year.
Beyond bringing ConstantSync to more smart phones, the company sees a market opportunity in two other areas, namely the simpler, standards-based phones that don’t offer the programmability of their more complex siblings, and the Java-based handsets that fall between the two, in that they have a limited degree of programmability.
Maynard said that among the former group, a number of phones support email server standards POP3 and/or IMAP, containing reading engines that can be configured to a particular email account. That’s fine for consumer email, but no corporate IT department is going to open its email server for mails to be read from any old IP address, he said. So we’ll add an abstraction layer whereby the user will go to our network operating center to retrieve their corporate mails. He said Visto will also offer a similar service through its NOC for SyncML retrieval of contacts, and calendar information.
As for Java phones, Maynard said Visto can embed its code inside the J2ME MIDP 2.0 environment they carry, enabling an email user experience closer to ConstantSync. With Visto’s much larger competitor Research In Motion, these phones must carry a second, non-standard Java implementation to enable its BlackBerry functionality.
If we have a limited programming capability in the phone, i.e. a couple of kilobytes, we can make sure it maintains a data connection to our NOC, automate the synchronization process, and send a message to the phone when a new mail comes into our server, he said. It will still be IP-triggered rather than pure push, but look and feel more like ConstantSync.
