Blackberry client returns to Nokia phones

Stuart Corner
Friday, 23 January 2009 03:22

Your IT - Home IT

Nokia phones will again be able to run the BlackBerry client software, thanks to Research in Motion which is bringing this back after Nokia dropped it two years ago, when it launched its own, since abandoned, push into the enterprise mobile email market.

Reuters quotes Tom Furlong, head of Nokia's consumer messaging services, saying: "We are in the interim period of time when we have dropped support [for BlackBerry email] ourselves, and Blackberry is readying support for their service on Nokia devices."

Nokia was the first mobile phone manufacturer to offer BlackBerry-enabled mobile phones in February 2004 on the Nokia 6820. Later that year support was enabled on the Series 80 based Nokia 9500 Communicator and with the Nokia 9300 Cingular became the first US carrier to launch BlackBerry services on a third party handset.

However shortly after embracing BlackBerry, Nokia launched its own $430m push into the enterprise email market, starting with the acquistion of IntelliSync in late 2005 .This move was precipitated by the runaway success of the Blackberry and was mirrored within weeks by Motorola buying Good Technology.

Nokia abandoned its in-house enterprise email activities in September 2008 announcing instead partnerships with Cisco and Microsoft to provide this and other mobility applications to enterprise customers. The company said that the technologies and expertise underpinning these activities would be reallocated to supporting a new focus on consumer push e-mail services.

The first fruit of this strategy was Nokia's Ovi service targeting first-time email users, and a messaging service, which enables the user to combine many different emails into a cellphone.

Furlong told Reuters: "The service is up, people are utilising it, we are getting good traction and good follow up." He added that Nokia expected to announce its first revenue-sharing agreements with operators for the messaging service within a few months.

"With the Nokia messaging service...we are trying to put mobile email to the masses, masses of people around the globe," he said.