4Smartphone to Push the envelope

You may have seen the reports on HowardForums, msmobiles.com, and other sites that Microsoft has released the highly-anticipated Service Pack 2 for Exchange Server 2003. I am currently in a Xpress subscription with 4Smartphone.net and just received word from them regarding SP2 and Push E-mail (is it e-mail or email?):

Dear Raphael,

Thanks for your interest in 4SmartPhone. We are currently supporting Push already using AUTD (SMS based). We are planning on deploying SP2 and offering the new services it enables such as task OTA sync and direct push at no additional cost to our customers.

We don't have an availability date yet as we will also need to test the service pack before making it available.

You should also know that while SP2 enables direct push, none of the Windows Mobile 5.0 devices currently sold support Direct Push.

All devices will require a ROM upgrade to do so and we are told that this upgrade should be available around 3GSM (early 2006) and nobody knows how and when carriers and device manufacturers will offer it to customers.

Best regards The 4SmartPhone Team

Hope that sheds some light on people who are wondering. Even if they did plop SP2 on their servers, our Wizards will have to wait on a update of the OS or hopefully (but not likely) a small hotfix or XIP update we can throw on the device. It is comforting to know that this company I have signed on with is very knowledgable and whom I consider as cutting-edge when it comes to Windows Mobile 5.0 support.

UPDATE: According to a reader on HowardForums who listened to the Exchange SP2 Live Webcast that just occurred, the Microsoft Messaging Security Feature Pack will be provided as a single download to be installed on your device. Whew! And I thought, here goes another hard reset!