MobileMe for the Rest of Us

By Carsten Brinkschulte

Apple's recent announcement to offer a hosted webmail, calendar, address book combined with push email and synchronization capabilities is yet another sign that, increasingly, device manufacturers are becoming service providers offering value-added services bundled with their devices. Nokia is executing a similar strategy with the OVI portal offering mobile services for their devices.

Synchronica has last week announced a major deal with a leading Chinese device manufacturer aimed at offering a hosted push email and synchronization service for the Chinese market.

However, in contrast to Apple's approach, Synchronica's Mobile Gateway is based on open industry standards (IMAP, SyncML) and works with the vast majority of smartphones and mass market mobile phones without requiring additional client software to be installed on the device. This makes Mobile Gateway a compelling choice for service providers (both mobile operators and device manufacturers) if they want to offer a MobileMe for the rest of us.

About Mobile Gateway

Synchronica's Mobile Gateway provides carrier-grade push email and synchronization services for virtually all mass market feature phones and smartphones being used by subscribers today. It is based on the dominant open industry standards Push IMAP (LEMONADE) for mobile email and SyncML (OMA DS) for contact and calendar synchronization and works with the built-in email and synchronization clients found in more than 1.5 billion phones. The new email-to-SMS functionality expands its reach to virtually every phone in use today. Serving consumers and prosumers, Mobile Gateway includes back-end support for POP3 and IMAP mailboxes, connecting to popular services, such as AOL or Gmail. For business users, it provides a unique zero footprint architecture where users simply register their devices and instantly start to receive corporate email on their phone, without requiring additional connectors behind the firewall. Business mailboxes supported include Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Domino, and Sun Java System Communications Suite.

About Synchronica

Synchronica plc develops and markets mobile email and synchronization solutions for mobile operators and device manufacturers. Products include the award-winning push email and synchronization solution Mobile Gateway and the device backup solution Mobile Backup. Based on industry standards, Synchronica can reach the built-in email and synchronization clients of more than 1.5 billion mobile devices on the market today. Service providers in emerging and developed markets use Synchronica products to offer mobile email, PIM synchronization, and backup and restore services to consumer and business subscribers.

Synchronica recently acquired AxisMobile and is set to become the leading player in mass market mobile email and synchronization middleware. The enhanced Synchronica Mobile Gateway will offer the most comprehensive multi-protocol mobile email solution in the market today, introducing email-to-SMS and email-to-MMS, as well as WAP and XHTML gateways. Document transcoding will add the ability to display a large variety of attachments, such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint on standard feature phones.

Headquartered in England, Synchronica has a development center in Germany and presences in the USA, Hong Kong, and Dubai. Synchronica plc is a public company traded on the AIM list of the London Stock Exchange (SYNC.LN). More information is available at www.synchronica.com

For more information, please contact:

Nicole Meissner
Chief Marketing Officer
Tel.: +44 1892 552 780
Mobile: +44 7977 256 412
Fax: +44 1892 552 721
nicole.meissner@synchronica.com