After much pressure from our New Zealand counter parts, we’ve finally agreed on the Kiwi country as our testing ground for the new Apple iPhone 3Gs and Nokia e75 handsets.
We chose New Zealand for the challenging terrain and marginal reception areas, of which (in comparison to Australia and Telstra coverage) there are many.

The goal is to thoroughly test not only the speed of the new Apple iPhone 3Gs, but the ability to connect with our My Hosted Exchange email service in regional areas.
One of the most talked about support issues for mobile phones connected to Hosted Exchange platforms is the ability to connect and operate with Hosted Microsoft Exchange Server whilst travelling away from metropolitan areas where signal strength is not the same quality as we take for granted in CBD areas.

So, 2 of our tech team members are off to New Zealand, where the local team in Auckland are taking them on a trip down the Coromandel Peninsula to Tauranga, then onto the south of the North Island to Wellington and beyond.

The timing of this exercise is certainly interesting, as the last few days have been a disaster for New Zealand’s leading mobile phone provider, Telecom, with another outage on their XT (3G aka: Telstra) mobile network for customers in the south of the north island, which is where our team will be this week.

Stay tuned, the results could be very interesting.
If you’d like to follow the trek with our New Zealand friends, you can do that via Twitter – follow em3_Australia or our team at My Hosted Exchange (MyHostedExchAU).

I travel between Australia and New Zealand often for business and family, so I’m personally keen to see the results on not only the effect of marginal reception whilst using Hosted Exchange services, but the overall performance of both the Apple iPhone 3Gs and the Nokia e75 handsets.

Best,

Darren Moss
General Manager
Australia and New Zealand