In my previous rant about the cost of the mobile Internet I neglected
to mention that I was talking about 2G or less networks.
3G is an entirely different beast.
Tom Raftery in his blog gives the low down on 3G costs.
Irish mobile broadband becomes more compelling
3 network passes on iPhone
3 also point to the high cost of 2G networks as the reason their not going to
support the iPhone.
So if you a serious user of the mobile Internet the 3G is a great option.
The only problem is that most people are still on 2G or less so we still need to
care about bandwidth.
The Coming of Gmail
When Google released GMail they eroded the two primary advantages of the desktop email client, Storage capacity and POP access.
Before GMail, web based email restricted users storage capacity to a couple of megabytes, users could access their POP accounts but only if they paid a premium for this service, Gmail allocates a couple of gigabytes and are continually increasing it, and Gmail allows users to access a number of POP accounts free of charge.
How long will it be before GMail uses GEARS to enable it’s use off line?
Add this to all the other advantages inherent in web based email clients, why would anyone still want to use a desktop email client?
Not everyone has broadband
Not everyone has a fast internet connection and using web based email on a slow connection is painful.
What they need is the solution which requires the lowest possible bandwidth.
Enter the desktop email client.
An email client such as Thunder Bird can be configured to only download the headers while leaving the rest of the message on the server, the user can then decided what important enough to download in full. This is an extremely efficient use of bandwidth.
The Future
I don’t think desktop email clients have much of a future, as high speed internet connections become even more common the need for desktop email clients will decrease and they will become a niche product.
Maybe this is an indication of what will happen to other types of desktop applications in future, Just look at Google Apps for a hint of what is possible.
