While there are many routes into the wireless industry overseas travel is not one of the most obvious, but it was Will Lau's route to the creation of SnapperMail the de-facto third party email client offering on Palm OS.

Back in 1999 Will embarked on his OE, or Overseas Experience, something of a tradition for young New Zealanders, spending several years in Europe and the Americas. On the trip Will chose to keep in touch with friends and family using a PalmPilot with a dial up modem, rather than relying on Internet Café's and Hotmail, mainly so he could write wherever and whenever he wanted to. At that stage the Palm had no native email application and Will used MultiMail, eventually getting to know Mark Lussier, the developer behind MultiMail.

By the time Will started to think of his returned to NZ he had developed an interest in the mobile and wireless economy. When Mark Lussier sold MultiMail to Palm Inc. in 2000, where it eventually became VersaMail and part of the standard PalmOne offering, Will realized there was a market opportunity for a fully featured alternatives to VersaMail. By coincidence Will met up with an old University buddy, Matthew Hebley, in Montreal and they got talking about the opportunity, and so SnapperMail was born.

The plans for SnapperMail were ambitious, with the goal of building an email client which fulfilled the requirements users would have in a 3G network. Feature such as unlimited attachment size, unlimited size mails were built into the application from the start with Matthew architecting the mail engine and Will designing the UI. The first release of SnapperMail happened towards the end of 2002 and received a massive response from Palm OS users, soon becoming the leading third party mail alternative for the platform.

To build on this success Snapperfish made the decision to look at alternative platforms, spurred on by enquiries from OS vendors, handset manufactures as well as device users on other platforms. As a result most of 2004 was spent building a cross-platform version of the SnapperMail mail engine.

The new SnapperMail core, called Triplex - coined from the time when Snapperfish saw Palm OS plus Symbian OS and Windows Mobile as its target platforms, is written as a fast mobile-friendly codebase on a subset of Personal Java, with a MIDP 2 port underway. The core represents some eighty percent of the codebase and provides all the basic business logic and communication functions.

For the UIQ implementation Snapperfish chose not to use the Symbian OS mail engine. "If we were to use the Symbian OS mail engine I don't believe we will be able to provide the experience we believe mobile mail users need," says Will. "For example one SnapperMail features is the ability to download the first few kilobytes of a message, regardless of message size. This is usually enough to let the user see what the message is about and reply or make an informed decision to grab the entire mail. With the Symbian OS mail engine the closest we could achieves was to take the just headers of large messages or the entire mail if the message is small - we could find no way around that." This was not the only deficiency in the Symbian OS mail engine from Snapperfish's perspective -Will describes most of the others as "minor" but still limitations that would have, overall, an undesirable impact on the user experience.

Despite the fact that Triplex is written in Java, Snapperfish will be building the application interface using the native UI's, built in C++ in the case of UIQ. "It is important to us that SnapperMail looks and feels like a native applications," says Will "So the twenty percent of code that provides device dependent features including much of the UI is written natively and interacts with the Triplex engine through JNI's."

The first implementation of Triplex will be in the UIQ version of SnapperMail which Will expects to release in mid 2005. Will's goal with SnapperMail on UIQ, and any supported platform, is to provide the best mobile email experience and sees this as coming from both SnapperMail's ease of use and several unique features.

SnapperMail pushes old messages out of the phones memory onto the memory card allowing the user to store several months if not years of historic email claims Will. "The database expansion gives SnapperMail users a desktop like archive experience," says Will. "They are able to search back through old mail to say find a contact they forgot to add to their contacts database, and all without cellular coverage."

SnapperMail will also have superior IMAP support for features such as IMAP subfolders. A "STARTTLS" scheme has also been implemented which will allow SnapperMail to handshake with Microsoft Exchange servers over SSL, where the IMAP interface has been implemented, allowing the client into hook into corporate exchange servers.

There is also a rich timed pull feature which allows complex scheduling so the user can pull mail only when they need to. Snapperfish is also considering a "responsive pull" feature which reacts to email "chatting" sessions pulling mail more often when email exchange is busy and reverting to the baseline schedule as exchanges slow.

One of the key features of SnapperMail on the Palm OS has been native file support. "MultiMail provided native file support with plugins but we wanted a better solution for SnapperMail," says Will. "On Palm OS we found that, as early as 1999 in version 3 of the OS, Palm Inc had provided native file support, but never tested and implemented the feature. As a result, working with four other companies, we implemented native file support on Palm OS ahead of Palm Inc themselves." The approach for UIQ will probably be different given that native file support is becoming as standard feature of many UIQ phones.

Despite Snapperfish's success on Palm OS they have found the support from PalmSource limited, very much at odds with the public perception of PalmSource nurturing the third party developer community. The opportunities presented by Palm OS licensees have also been limited and is the reason why Snapperfish has stuck largely with a retail model for distributing its software. This is likely to remain the business model for the UIQ version, although Will notes that Sony Ericsson developer support have been very helpful. Snapperfish remains open to other got to market channels and is in discussions with several hardware manufacturers.

UIQ support was a fairly easy business decision for Snapperfish. "Many Symbian OS developers have come from the Palm OS world and we have been able to draw on their experiences," say Will. "Those experiences told us that there are more UIQ smartphones than the Palm OS smartphones in the market and that UIQ users buy more software than the Palm OS users, so moving to UIQ was something of a no-brainer."

While Snapperfish have designed their Triplex engine to work on the sparse resources of a Series 60 phone, they have no immediate short term plans to support this platform. "We see the typical Series 60 buyer as someone who wants a smart dumb phone," says Will. "As such they are not looking to add software so we don't see Series 60 as a lucrative market. Our dealings with Nokia have been positive and we may look at Series 80 next year when the market potential can be assessed. We think SnapperMail will have a much better fit with Series 80 than Series 60 user."

Snapperfish's biggest problem with developing outside Palm OS has been finding the skills and expertise they need. "We have found very little expertise in Symbian OS and UIQ within New Zealand," says Will. "We are constantly on the lookout for people with UIQ skills who would like to work for us in Auckland, or for skilled contractors who can help us build up our knowledge."

Beyond the UIQ implementation Snapperfish sees a Windows Mobile implementation as its next expansion with thoughts of BlackBerry to follow. Push email is also a feature which Snapperfish is actively considering.

SnapperMail for UIQ is expected to launch as a consumer application in mid 2005. More information on SnapperMail can be found on the products website, www.snappermail.com.