Meanwhile, Exchange has been widely used in small and medium businesses for almost a decade, starting with the widespread adoption of Microsoft Small Business Server 2003 and continuing now with the successful rollout of the Office 365 hosted Exchange service. Kindle Fires will turn up in enterprises just like all the other smartphones and tablets that were originally intended to be “consumer” devices. That doesn’t really match the reality, though. It’s possible to imagine that Amazon has no interest in breaking into the enterprise market, where Exchange has become a de facto standard, especially now that RIM and Blackberry are rapidly imploding. I can’t find any explanation of why it was stripped out of the Kindle Fire. All Android phones and tablets can connect to an Exchange mailbox and sync mail, calendar, and contacts. Android has always supported ActiveSync, the engine that drives the process of syncing with an Exchange mailbox. Under the hood, a Kindle Fire is running a highly customized version of Google’s Android operating system. Where’s Exchange? (Or, as it’s quaintly known on Motorola Android phones, “Corporate.”) The picture on the left shows all the built-in mail connectors: Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, and “other” (which covers POP3 and IMAP accounts). While we’re talking about the Kindle Fire, it’s worth noting one strange omission: the Kindle Fire does not have a built-in connection to Exchange mailboxes.
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