Motorola Good Mobile Messaging 5 to be launched for the Nokia E71

UPDATE: November 29 2008

I thought it would be worth an update on this post, as it receives a fair number of hits every day so many others must also be hanging out for the E71 + Goodlink fix.

I’ve been testing version 5.1.0.24 on my E71 and E61i.  The good news is that it works on both devices!  The keyboard issue with the E71 and version 4.9.3.34 has been fixed, and with version 5 there are some nice new features.

The bad news is that it’s not quite there yet (5.1 is still in Beta).  I managed to get GMM 5.1.0.24 downloaded OTA when I went to get.good.com and entered my Fasthosts email credentials, and everything was going fine but I noticed that not all of my 7,200 outlook contacts had been downloaded.

According to the super support team at Motorola Good, I have the “power-user performance issue ” – lucky me, but this will be fixed in the final release.

When I ran the new 5.1 client on the E71 on a Goodlink test account (with only 1 contact), it worked perfectly.

I can’t wait for the final release, and to have my E71 humming along with GMM 5 – it is worth the wait.

When Motorola purchased Goodlink, those of us using Nokia devices with Goodlink were rightly concerned that Motorola would downgrade, or stop support for Nokia/Symbian devices because Motorola is a direct competitor of Nokia.

[ For those not familiar with Good, it’s better than Blackberry and provides simply the best corporate push email experience around. ]

When Good Mobile Messaging 5 (GMM 5) was released about a year ago, mysteriously there was no Symbian version available.

With the recent news that the Nokia E71 is not entirely compatible with Good Mobile Messaging, the official Be Good portal was alive with E71 users wanting a quick fix.

I’ve also received a number of direct messages hinting that Motorola have given Good more flexibility in designing for Symbian (Nokia), now that Nokia don’t appear to be supporting Blackberry for the E71.

This actually provides Motorola Good with an open goal to provide a superior corporate push email solution on a superior corporate phone – the Nokia E71.  Unfortunately, the native email client, even when used with mail for exchange just doesn’t measure up for corporate mail when using Exchange.

The official word from Motorola Good is that the Symbian beta of Good Mobile Messaging 5 is due in late September, and I have been invited to participate. Provided that my hosted Good provider (Fasthosts in the UK) can open up the GMM 5 beta client for testing, then I’ll be able to see how Good (pun intended) GMM 5 is.  Having been running GMM 4.9.3.34 on my Nokia E61, E61i and now E71, it will be interesting to see how the improvements in GMM 5 stack up on the Nokia.