Good goes European

MOBILE EMAIL SPECIALIST Good Technology has finally decided to fully internationalise its offering. It now supports four different languages besides English, plus it has finally recognised that not every big company worships at the altar of the Beast of Redmond.

So GoodLink 4.5 will be available in French, Italian, German and Spanish. Also, in addition to support for wireless PDAs like the HP HW6515 Mobile Messenger and the palmOne Treo 650, it now supports various Microsoft Windows Mobile Smartphone-based handsets like the Motorola MPX 220 and Orange C500.

Of course, Good hasn't been able to do anything as radical as supporting Symbian based handsets. But - and this is a giant step - it has announced its intention to support other email servers besides Xchange. Yup, it will support Notes and Domino too. They've even promised Groupwise and IMAP as well.

This seachange actually results from the fact that Good has acquired another technology company, JP Mobile, which already possessed most of these products anyway. So it's a question of migration.

The INQ's favourite feature offered by Goodlink is the ability to zap all your sensitive data using an OTA (Over-the-Air) command. So if your PDA is stolen but has a live connection - Pow! - all you data disappears.

And for total Bozos who then find their PDAs in the bottom of their suitcase, a network manager can resend all the necessary parameters to restore the device. It should take 15 to 20 mins depending on the connexion type.

And for those network managers who we'd term Network Nazis, it's possible to block access to emails if the connecting device doesn't have its virus checkers and firewalls up-to-date. Of course, it's up to the customers to enforce such a policy. It isn't mandatory.

The inevitable comparisons will be made with RIM. The big difference is that with Good's technology you can use a bog standard Microsoft Exchange server. Unlike Visto or Smartner, however, Good's brand is in your face, which may stop the big European operators from promoting it.

Who knows? µ