Quote:
Originally Posted by FanIn80
Also, just to clear things up... If you set up the iPhone via the Exchange Account option in the Mail settings, then you're actually connecting with ActiveSync, not OWA. You're just using the domain name for your Exchange server, which (of course) happens to be the same thing you use when connecting through OWA. There's no such thing as "OWA Sync." OWA is nothing more than a web application you run within a web browser. It has no other purpose than that.
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This is 100% correct. People need to realize that you aren’t connecting your iPhone to OWA. In fact, there is no reason at all that ActiveSync need even be running on the same physical server as OWA - in a large environment it’s quite possible that the ActiveSync and OWA services would be farmed out to separate boxes for load balancing and redundancy reasons.
To further complicate things, there is also EWS, which is Exchange Web Services. This is basically an API provided over HTTP(S) for client side applications rather than having those apps pretend they are web browsers and interact via the more limited OWA functionality. This is how Mail.app, iCal, and Contacts interact with Exchange in Snow Leopard. It’s also how the EWS enabled version of Entourage works.
ActiveSync imposes a slight battery penalty, as it basically consists of a long-running HTTP connection to the server - this is how the server is able to push email in real time (the connection is already established). In practice, I don’t think the penalty is all that huge, iPhone users are used to charging much more frequently than BB users to begin with, and using ActiveSync to push email isn’t going to force an iPhone user to charge more often than they already do (in other words, most iPhone users are going to be charging daily or every other day regardless)
Edit: one other point of confusion in all this is that people aren’t mentioning whether their servers are Exchange 2003, or 2007/2010. ActiveSync is only available for iPhone devices on Exchange 2007 and higher. So when some people say they are getting their mail via OWA, they might also really be talking about IMAP or POP access to Exchange 2003, both of which are miserable experiences compared to ActiveSync or BES. In these cases, you lose push, and are stuck polling every 15 minutes or so. I think, but can’t confirm, that this is what is happening when people claim BB on BES is so much faster than the iPhone - in my experience, ActiveSync and BES are neck and neck for performance. In fact, both typically push a message to my mobile device faster than native Outlook receives them.