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Only a week after Research In Motion (RIM) announced plans to enter the Chinese market, the push e-mail leader's most recent legal adversary, Visto, said it too would provide its services in China. Unlike RIM, which is partnering with the country's largest wireless operator - China Mobile - Visto is working with Lenovo, the company that bought IBM's Personal Computing Division (and now the number 3 PC manufacturer in the world), to deliver mob-e-mail and data access services directly to businesses of all sizes on the Chinese Mainland.

"China is central to our strategy and we will continue to invest heavily in the region, providing partners such as Lenovo with the superior local resources that are required for driving adoption among China's 400 million mobile users," according to Visto Chairman CEO Brian Bogosian. The company has 60 employees in China with plans to expand.

Approaching China in this fashion is something of a departure in strategy for Visto, which has traditionally delivered its wares as a white-label e-mail service to operators, who would then turned around and sell it to subscribers under their own brand. With Lenovo, the Visto brand stays front and center. The solution is called Visto Mobile.

Visto Mobile will initially be offered for 12 mobile devices—including the Lenovo ET960 & ET 980; Nokia 6600, 7610, 6670, & 3230; Sony Ericsson P910C; Dopod 818, 828, 838, 585 and 586—in both Chinese and English.

Lenovo said it will deploy the service internally and already has commitments from some of China's largest enterprises to launch Visto Mobile, which is available immediately. Lenovo Chinaweal president Caihong He said, "With Visto Mobile, we deliver a mobile push email service to satisfy the needs of business customers, regardless of their size, email infrastructure, or preferred mobile device."

RIM's roll out with China Mobile will take a little more time, although it begins next week with multinational corporations. After delivering service to the hundreds of thousands people in that market, the company then plans to move onto the native population before - eventually - releasing BlackBerry handhelds themselves - RIM's chief money maker - at some unannounced future date.

Both Visto and RIM will face competition from the likes of state-owned carrier China Unicom's RedBerry service for CDMA phones and China Mobile's own BlackBerry alternative, called PushMail.

Meanwhile, Visto sued RIM a couple of weeks ago after winning a patent infringement suite against fellow wireless e-mail provider Seven Networks. The company claims RIM infringed on the very same patents as Seven. RIM countered a few days later with a motion stating Visto's patents weren't valid to start with, and may sue the Redwood City, CA company for trampling on its own patents.

Visto senior VP and co-founder Daniel Méndez asserted in a recent interview with PDAStreet that "we have strong case against RIM. We do believe that our patents have been proven valid. And we do believe they are infringing on our technology. And the legal remedy available to us is an injunction. With that said, we are business people. And if we can reach an equitable deal for both parties, we would definitely consider it. But, if there isn't a deal, and they force us to shut them down, we will."

RIM is still recovering from the fallout from its five year patent infringement suit with - and eventual $612.5 million payout to - NTP.