Love the push email on your Android phone, but not so much in love that it’s only available for Gmail? Well SEVEN may be the way to go, which brings push email to all email accounts, not just Gmail and Exchange on Android 2.1 OS devices.
After downloading SEVEN, you’ll get two new icons in your application drawer of your Android device, SEVEN IM, and SEVEN Mail. Both are very easy to set up. The mail app has quite a nice look to it, sporting a black background with white text, staying away from the standard Gmail app look. A line of icons lay atop of the screen, making it easier than ever to switch between email accounts and search for contacts through all accounts.
SEVEN mail is more battery friendly than that of the pre-installed Gmail application on Android devices. It offers better management of bandwidth and signaling when it comes to network utilization. Because of this, the SEVEN push email system isn’t as “pushy” as the native Gmail application, and you’ll have to wait a few minutes to receive your email.
I ran two tests to see how fast I would receive my emails from both the Gmail, and SEVEN applications. In the first test, Gmail received the email in 14 seconds, and SEVEN took about 3.5 minutes. The second test took Gmail 30 seconds, and SEVEN took about a little under 4.5 minutes. So, there are differences, but they aren’t like the built-in POP/IMAP Android email application, which takes around 15 minutes.
The SEVEN IM application currently only supports Google Talk, and Windows Live Messenger, but they assured us that AIM and Yahoo! will be added before the application makes it out of beta. The IM application just as with the email app, makes it just as easy to add accounts and get to chatting with all of your friends. I didn’t get too much time to play around with it, as I only have a Google Talk account, and rarely use it. Still, it shows promise, and looks great.
SEVEN is a great option if you have multiple email accounts from different services. Having and Android phone since late 2008 has made me go completely Google, so I have no need for such application, but if you do, SEVEN should be one of your first choices.
Download SEVEN beta .