S$5/mth for SingTel push mail on the Nokia E63

After months of running a free beta trial, Nokia has finally launched its push mail service via SingTel – the first of its type in Asia, so says the press release.

From tomorrow, SingTel users who buy the new Nokia E63 phone and sign up for a S$5-a-month MobileM@ail Plus data plan for two years will get the push mail service free of charge.

According to Nokia and SingTel, MobileM@il Plus also comes with a bundle of 10MB data and PhoneSafe – a mobile phone security offering that “lets customers lock phone, backup and delete important data such as emails from phones remotely”.

The big deal about the push mail service from Nokia is that it works right out of the box. All you need is your e-mail address and password to get going.

It’s the Finnish phone maker’s way of hitting back hard. Faced with Apple’s iPhone and iTunes, it recently launched Nokia Comes with Music; now, it has Blackberrys in its sights as it aims to offer e-mail out of the box.

In future, other Nokia phones sold here are expected to offer the same push mail offerings as well. For now, S$5-a-month for e-mail pushed to your phone sounds fair enough to me – similarly, I have no problems paying S$5 for unlimited IM on my phone.

It’s about time telcos started charging micro-amounts for services, rather than data blocks for those who are not ready to fork out S$48 to S$70+ a month for unlimited mobile broadband.

But I still got several questions – and I’ll update this as Nokia comes back to me:

1) What happens to Nokia users who are still on the free trial now – will they have to pay now?

2) Will this push mail service be available to StarHub and MobileOne users in future?

2) Will the price be the same for buyers of other Nokia phone models (I’m told Nokia E75 users will get push mail free, for example)?