Click to View

In its bid to become the dominant purveyor of wireless e-mail and data access, Research In Motion (RIM) launched two programs—BlackBerry Connect and BlackBerry Built-In—this year to encourage other mobile device vendors to implement its BlackBerry services on their handhelds, mobile phones, mail phones and smartphones.

RIM hit the jackpot today with the announcement that Nokia, the number one mobile phone vendor, would license BlackBerry e-mail and data solutions for its next-generation 9500 communicator. Based on the mobile phone giant's Series 80 flavor of the Symbian platform, the 9500 is the descendent of one of the first smartphones lines, 9200, that Nokia launched back in the late nineties.

As with Hewlett-Packard's iPAQ h6315 (see Wait Over for iPAQ Smartphone) and Motorola's equally anticipated MPx (see Motorola Delays Mpx Smartphone, Nixes Another), the 9500 will integrate both cellular and Wi-Fi. Other features include a full QWERTY keyboard and a joystick for easy navigation—a nice addition because communicators don't have touchscreens. (For more on the 9500, see Nokia Adds Wi-Fi to Communicator Series.)

Nokia is the second major mobile handset vendor, after Siemens, in little over a month to go with BlackBerry for one of its products. (see Siemens Builds BlackBerry into SK65 Mail Phone)

As a result, individuals and small businesses can use the BlackBerry Internet Service to enable push-based access to multiple existing business or personal e-mail accounts from a Nokia 9500 communicator. For corporate customers, BlackBerry Enterprise Server software tightly integrates with Microsoft Exchange or IBM Lotus Domino for secure, push-based, wireless access to e-mail and calendar information on the corporate network from the same smartphone. Novel GroupWise support is expected later this year.

To RIM, partnering with Nokia helps expand the type of services the mobile phone company and its mobile operator partners can deliver. RIM's VP of Corporate Marketing Mark Guibert said "With BlackBerry Connect support, Nokia's customers in the U.S., Europe and Asia Pacific will be able to realize significant productivity benefits through enhanced connectivity and carriers will be able to leverage their success with the BlackBerry platform in conjunction with Symbian OS-based Series 80 mobile devices."

RIM Licensing
BlackBerry sales continue to grow at an astronomical rate, around 300 percent last quarter, moving the company into fourth place behind Nokia, palmOne and Hewlett-Packard. Correspondingly, the company increased its market share from 2.7 to 8.2 percent. RIM is smartly hedging its bets, however, though licensing. (see RIM Bolsters Bottom Line by Licensing).

With remote access to e-mail and corporate networks from a mobile handset or handheld becoming a must for mobile professionals and enterprises, RIM is taking advantage of its reputation as the "name" in mobile e-mail to boost its bottom line. And with more and more mobile devices offering variations on RIM's signature BlackBerry thumb keyboard, and many other mobile handsets delivering superior voice services and the same types of data access solutions, making the move to licensing is probably a good idea.

Just ask Apple, which blew its chance to make its superior Macintosh operating system the desktop computing standard back in the 1980s by refusing to license its platform to other manufactures. When it finally did so in the mid nineties, Microsoft and the PC was to firmly entrenched for the move to have any impact.