This is the third post in my series of reviews of the BlackBerry 8230. These were originally written in April, 2009 on an internal blog and are being reposted here.
I’ve been a BlackBerry user for the past 6 months or so, and before that I had used a couple of other Windows-based smart phones. The biggest difference that I noticed when I moved to the BlackBerry was that the device seemed to be designed around being a great email tool. All email functionality seemed to be very well thought out, and synchronization with my corporate TELUS email account was flawless.
With the Flip, I decided to point my Gmail account at the device in hopes of using it for my personal email, this is where I ran into my first major snag with the device: Email synchronization.
Up to this point, whenever I’d been using the BlackBerry email client, it was leveraging the BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES). BES is what allows the BlackBerry to securely interface with TELUS’ internal mail servers. Using BES email is perfectly synchronized and changes in my inbox show up on the BlackBerry in seconds.
With the Flip, I set up my Gmail account using the built-in wizard. Because the email client on the phone is the same as the one I was using on my Curve I expected everything to work the same way. It doesn’t. Because the link to Gmail is working over an older (and unencrypted I’d bet) POP3 connection there’s no way to synchronize the status of messages (whether they’ve been read, deleted, flagged etc). This causes all mail downloaded to the BlackBerry to essentially be a copy of what was in the inbox when the message was downloaded.
I’ll talk about another way to get your email working on the Flip (for Gmail at least) in my next post. But for now my email experience, for personal email at least, has been less than ideal.
Tags: 8230 · blackberry · Blackberry Flip Reviews · email · flip · gmail · handset · mail · messaging · pearl · phone · review · rim · smartphone2 Comments
To be honest, I find that the sync between emails on your BB and your inbox in Gmail get’s frustrating. Just because I read something on my BB, and want to flag it as read just so I don’t have the annoying alert saying I have something unopened, doesnt mean I don’t want to leave it unread in my inbox so that I can deal with it later when I get to my computer.
I work off the 8830 with Bell, the World edition, and it’s got some of the worst sync issues sinces I downloaded the new firmware. It no longer allows me to delete messages on both my BB and in my inbox even though I have the settings set up such that when I remove an email from my BB inbox it removes it from my GMail inbox.
I suppose there’s no perfect way that’ll satisfy everyone. The behaviour you describe is exactly what I want it to do. I end up using Gmail’s “star” functions to add items to my to-do list.
I’ve also found that the Gmail app sync’s better than trying to run through BIS.