Consumer mobile email is ready to boom

First of all, let me thank all the people that participated in our survey. If you know me and you already received the ten bucks, please keep them because you clearly owe me a beer :-)) A good opportunity to pay back is CTIA in Orlando, starting next week. We'll be there. Stop by our Funambol booth #1177 and BYOB...

At CTIA, we'll have the cool phone holder but also the results of the survey. The latter are quite interesting, for example:

Previous studies have reported that consumers want mobile email but are not willing to pay much for it. Funambol's survey found that consumers indeed want mobile email, and that the majority is willing to pay for it, on average about $5 per month. Furthermore, many will be making the move to adopt it within the year. Consumers also indicated that they are looking for mobile email that is easy-to-use and that seamlessly interoperates with their web and PC email systems.

Consumers are willing to move fast (thank you so much!) and pay $5/month (that is even nicer, but since you pay over $5/m for SMS today, I was kinda expecting it...).

Other key findings:

-- There will be hundreds of millions of new mobile email users in the coming years and they are more likely to be consumers than business users. Almost half of the survey respondents who do not use mobile email said they expect to start using it within a year.

-- People use a wide range of mobile devices all over the world and a mobile email solution aimed at the mass market needs to support a broad set of devices. Of the mobile brands used by survey respondents, the second most popular choice was "Other," meaning other than Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola or BlackBerry (RIM).

-- Non-users of mobile email want mobile email that is easy to navigate and read, easy to use and that allows them to reuse email addresses from their web/PC-based email.

-- For existing users of mobile email, the main inhibitors to increased usage are functional and technical limitations, and cost. The top reason to consider switching to a different mobile email service was better interoperability with web and PC email.

-- There are significant differences between users and non-users of mobile email. These include brand of mobile device, how much they paid for it, how many emails they get or expect to get, how much they are willing tospend on mobile email and their attitude toward technology adoption.

Very interesting stuff, in my opinion. And it is quite fun to go through the report and see all the graphs with the differences between prosumers (already hooked on email) and consumers (still wandering, but interested). Obviously, the report is free (and open ;-)

See you at CTIA, do not miss the report!