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Reseach In Motion (RIM) continues in its quest to become the dominant purveyor of mobile email solutions with the announcement today of a deal with U.K. carrier O2. The companies have agreed to enable BlackBerry connectivity on O2's Xda II smartphone later this year. The Xda II is a Windows Mobile 2003 for Pocket PC Phone Edition device.

Through RIM's BlackBerry Connect licensing program, Xda II corporate users will be able to connect to BlackBerry Enterprise Server and individuals and smaller businesses will be able to connect to BlackBerry Web Client services.

As a result, O2 customers will no longer need to proactively think about downloading their email on their Xda II, as BlackBerry’s always-on connectivity and push-based technology automatically delivers email directly to and from the user's smartphone.

Today's O2 announcement follows several similar deals between Samsung, Sony Ericsson, and PalmSource, and RIM. All of these deals aim to deliver BlackBerry email support to these companies’ devices and platforms.

By partnering with RIM, these vendors hope to improve the chances of the entry of their platforms into the enterprise market, where BlackBerry devices have done very well because of RIM's pushed-based email solution.

In addition, many enterprises that already use BlackBerry Enterprise Server and those that are thinking about installing don't want to be limited to one handheld solution. In some cases, it just isn't practical to only support BlackBerry when there are so many more Windows Mobile, Symbian and Palm OS PDAs and smartphones out there. Allowing these enterprises to deploy other platforms gives RIM an additional selling point for its corporate access solutions.

Xda II

The Xda II runs a 400MHz Intel XScale processor, and includes 128MB or RAM, a built-in digital camera, multimedia messaging service (MMS) capability, integrated Java and a 65,536-color display. The triband GSM smartphone offes Wi-Fi as an option and is Bluetooth-enabled.