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04/27/2008
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Always interesting to read good third party face-offs. Here, SMS Text News' Ben has been trialling both DataViz's RoadSync and Nokia's free Mail for Exchange for a staggering nine months. Here's his verdict, although personally the latter's price can't really be beaten(!) .
Read on in the full article.
Nice review - but I have different opinions on this. I too have used RS for 9 months before M4E version 2 came onboard (and then I jumped ship so quickly)..
Memory usage:
Roadsync is a sucker for memory in comparison to M4E. I did some tests with the older firmware and its like 4 MB for RS and 2 MB for M4E.
Every MB counts so that you dont get the "out of memory errors". This means that with RS, you are only limited to running Opera Mini and cannot use the built in Web browser without causing issues. This also means daily reboots to get your memory back before you can run apps such as Video or Camera.
Stability issues:
Roadsync runs as a foreground application that is constantly getting refreshed into memory even if you close it. It comes back on every 2 minutes or so. The problem with foreground apps is that it has the lowest priority (for memory usage) and will close when the phone runs out of memory. Try opening some JScript intensive Webpages and you will see that it will try and close Roadsync. Since it constantly tries to reload, it will crash and cause MASSIVE page faults.
Database Errors:
In my 9 months of RS usage (with the latest versions), one of the biggest issues is database corruptions. This happens when there are problems with the memory and corrupts the database. The Roadsync icon in messages turn into a question mark and will not run at all. In this case, I had to uninstall the product, reinstall and resync everything. This has happened to me 4 times in 9 months I have used it.
Connection errors:
RS will once in a while stop connecting to our E2k3 server. In this instance, I have had to delete the account and start from scratch.
As far as I can see, the only advantage of RS versus M4E is the ability to sync sub folders other than the main one (handy for those people who put server based sorting rules. The old advantages such as GAL lookups, Task synchronisations etc are now included from V2 onwards. RS also does not support the new enhanced features of E2K7 including the security features of Remote Wipe (whereas M4E 2.x onwards does).
Yes, the earlier versions of M4E (1.x) absolutely sucked.. and lacked so many features.. but 2.x just blew everything away hands down.
There are plenty more to say.. but these are the main points that I have tested
(BTW. I manage a fleet of 300 mobiles in our very large corporate network of roughly 50-50 split between WM05 and S60-3ed so these are the experiences we have come across when we implemented this 2 years ago).
I have been using Mail for Exchange for quite some time now and I prefer it over Roadsync due to the lower RAM consumed by it and of course, because its free. Unfortunately, I am still stuck on version 1.3 since my n93 wont accept a version after that. Although this limits the functionality I am exposed to (no access to GAL), it serves my purpose since I need push email only for my office mail and when I am not in office i.e. after office hours and on holidays.
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