Blackberry devices are popular not only for their ergonomic design and handy thumb keyboard but also because they push e-mail to your device as soon as it arrives. Other devices have to pull e-mail from a server at set intervals, making it hard to have an e-mail conversation when your e-mail only comes in every 10 minutes or so.

Now, according to PC World, Nokia is getting into the push e-mail game with a FREE service for one year that pushes e-mail to your Nokia phone. This is interesting on two levels - 1) By offering it for free, a lot of people are going to try it out just to see how it works, and 2) Blackberry devices work best in corporate environments where users have a Microsoft Exchange e-mail server, but a lot of small businesses don’t have Exchange, they use POP and IMAP. The Nokia service is only for POP and IMAP accounts.

For small business owners, this means a great alternative to $30-$60 per month for Blackberry service, although users have to decide if switching devices is worth it. Those Blackberry keyboards are nice, and crunching out e-mails on a phone keypad and tiny screen would be mind numbing. While Nokia supports older models that have full QWERTY keyboards, they only have a couple of current models with one (the 9500 at $799.99 and the 6820 for free with a new contract).

So ultimately, if you have a Nokia phone that works with the service, it’s free so why not try it out. It may be well suited just to keep track of what’s coming in your inbox, even jotting down a quick response occasionally. But if you need two-way e-mail capability, it may be worthwile to wait and see how Microsoft’s Mobile 5.0 shapes up…