Nokia says that their Messaging service is easy to set-up and use with push e-mail services that support up to ten personal e-mail accounts on one device.

Nokia Messaging supports all leading consumer e-mail solutions including Gmail, Windows Live, Hotmail and Yahoo! mail as well as local email services from MWEB, MTN Play and Webmail.

Says Sarah Crowe, head of marketing at Nokia South Africa, “The Nokia Messaging Service is the consumer pillar in Nokia’s overall messaging strategy … also includes Ovi Mail for free emerging e-mail services and Mail for Exchange and IBM Lotus Traveler for corporate e-mail mobilisation. This three-pronged approach positions Nokia well to provide quality messaging solutions to all of our consumers”.

Sounds good – but I don’t see how it plans to compete with other mobile platforms that offer much of the same for free, or as part of a service agreement, ala BlackBerry. There also isn’t much incentive to upgrade from the free beta to the paid-for service. And if you’re on another network, say Vodacom or Cell C, then you can continue to use the beta.

As for ease-of-use and partnering with local email providers – setting up email on a BlackBerry, iPhone or Android device is already a simply process of inserting your username and password. It doesn’t get simpler than that, surely?

As part of its agreement with MTN, Nokia will be offering the Messenger service as a bundle on the Nokia E63 combined with a 10MB data plan. The E63 is pretty sweet, although its S60 operating system is getting seriously long in the tooth. And 10MB? In 2010? Seriously?

The Nokia E63 Messaging bundle will be available at participating MTN stores from the end of April 2010 at an approximate retail price of R119 per month on MTN AnyTime 100.

Nokia has shown strong prospects in the smartphone market with the N900 and the move to make Ovi Maps an entirely free service. I also think the agreement with Intel to co-develope the MeeGo platform is a step in the right direction.

But the Nokia Messenger announcement is underwhelming.

For, like, R20 more than the MTN deal you could get the BlackBerry 8520 on contract, with unlimited connectivity (which is quite a bit more than 10MB), including messaging and simple set-up.

Even at the low-end of the market this service and, more so, the contract from MTN makes no sense. Unless I’m missing something?

Thankfully local IT distribution powerhouse Mustek has it’s very own in-house messiah in the form of their CTO, Dimitri Tserpis. Dimitri wrangled up an Intel Extreme Series DX38BT board, otherwise known as the ‘Bonetrail’ and gave it to me gratis.

They say good journalists can’t be bought, but this is bollocks. Both Intel and Mustek are now on my List of Legends and other Rad People and Organisations who Rock. They have earned my bias. Buy their stuff.

So if you come ’round my base in Team Fortress 2 looking for aksie, I will hand you your ass with the help of my new arsenal. And my level 70 druid in World of Warcraft will murderise you in any battleground, even though my account was cancelled six months ago and my computer may be off at the time. You have been warned.

Now all I need is one of them new-fangled water-cooled Nvidia cards to make everything look the part. And some DDR3 RAM. It’s a sunny day in geekville.

• 13.3-inch LED-backlit glossy widescreen display with 1280×800 resolution
• 1.6 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 4MB L2 cache
• 800 MHz front-side bus
• 2GB of 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
• 80GB hard disk drive with Sudden Motion Sensor
• Intel Graphics Media Accelerator X3100
• Micro-DVI port (includes Micro-DVI to VGA and Micro-DVI to DVI Adapters)
• Built-in iSight video camera
• Built-in AirPort Extreme 802.11n wireless networking and Bluetooth 2.1+EDR
• One USB 2.0 port
• One headphone port
• Multi-touch TrackPad with support for advanced multi-touch gestures including tap, scroll, pinch, rotate and swipe
• 45 Watt MagSafe Power Adapter.

The Macbook Air will retail for $1799 (around 12300 South African rand) and boasts an impressive five hours of battery life.

This was one of several announcements made by Jobs during his 2008 Macbook keynote, which enjoyed record attendance and a huge audience of online viewers tracking feeds at popular rumor sites.

Other announcements included new updates for the iPhone and iPod Touch, a new product called Time Capsule; a network-attached storage device designed for use with Apple’s Time Machine software, movie rentals from the iTunes movie store and an update to the Apple TV that adds support for renting HD or DVD quality movies with 5.1 surround sound and removing the requirement for using a computer to get media to the Apple TV. Of course, movie rentals via iTunes are exclusively being launched for the American market and will only be introduced to regions where the iTunes Music Store is available – so you can forget about seeing it in South Africa any time soon.

I was personally hoping for the announcement of an HSDPA iPhone which would have precipitated my purchase of one. Nonetheless, the free update to the existing iPhone is awesome as are the new features being introduced to the iPod Touch, including Apple’s Mail.app email application. Existing Touch owners will have to fork out $20 (R140) for the update, however.

The announcement of the Macbook Air overshadowed all others and this product is set to raise the bar on the small-form-factor notebook market. Apple is giving Sony a hard run for their money in this department and has introduced some tough-to-beat features in the Macbook Air, such as multi-touch technology integrated into the Air’s trackpad.