Exchange ActiveSync on the HTC Magic

Since my post on the HTC Magic yesterday, I’ve been thinking more and more about the native Exchange sync feature that HTC has built in to that phone. To my knowledge, it’s the first shipping Android phone to support Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) out of the box. I’m surprised that this isn’t being talked about more in other blogs and mobile news on the Internet. It could be that nobody yet cares. I care because I spend a lot of time, and I mean a LOT of time thinking about smartphones and Exchange ActiveSync, but I digress…

It seems that Google itself is creating some level of confusion around the EAS capabilities on this phone. You can read about that over at Engadget and over at CNET. I think it would be a pity if HTC went to all trouble of EAS enabling the Magic, and that phone, with that capability, does not make it to the US. In fact, I think it would be nonsense given the fact that Google has actually licensed the server side of the EAS protocol for use in Google Sync. I think it’s starting to become clearer that EAS is going to be the de facto standard protocol for syncing email and PIM to smart mobile devices.

Even if Google itself if being a bit schizophrenic about EAS with respect to Android, it is clear that HTC is making a smart move by building that capability itself. In fact, I would even go on to say that this is a no-brainer for HTC. Obviously Apple had the foresight to do this with iPhone OS 2.0 and HTC, which has long been a Windows Mobile shop, knows that the folks who buy their handsets want to connect them to work.

What is unclear at the moment is whether or not the versions of the Magic with EAS supports any EAS security policies, with password/PIN enforcement and remote wipe being the most critical. Details from HTC are not forthcoming, so I’ll be testing this in hopefully the not to distant future and I’ll post my results here. It’s quite possible that the phone will not support any security features in this first cut. I do however think that would be unfortunate. If the phone is connecting to corporate mail servers via EAS, then both corporate IT and the end-user need to have some confidence that the data on the device is protected in the case of theft or loss. HTC should know this given their long experience with Windows Mobile.