Historically, Nokia smartphones have never been an obvious choice for corporate customers. That changed slightly when the Finnish manufacturer incorporated Exchange and BlackBerry Connect support in its E series smartphones. Exchange support is still around, but Nokia has now decided to no longer offer BlackBerry Connect in its business smartphones, which initially became evident in the new Nokia E66 and the Nokia E71 smartphones.
This comes at a time when RIM is expanding its service offering on Windows Mobile devices, so what's really going on? Interestingly, RIM signed a deal with Brightpoint back in May, with the aim of spreading RIM's corporate solutions, and smartphones, to every corner of the world. Brightpoint was already a key factor in Nokia's distribution of the E series smartphones to those same markets.
We're not going to speculate on who ditched who, but to us, it seems like Nokia is beginning to feel the heat in one of its core markets, and as such, may be trying to create its own messaging solution. However, we don't have to go further than Apple's recent launch of MobileMe, or take a quick look at the history of Exchange for smartphones, to see that it could take quite some time before a proprietary messaging solution would become the main selling point for a Nokia smartphone.
With the introduction of more multimedia-centric smartphones that are still capable of taking full advantage of corporate messaging solutions, Research In Motion's offerings such as the BlackBerry Curve and BlackBerry Bold could prove to really take RIM to new heights. Given the company's efforts in bringing the BlackBerry OS to a clamshell phone through the rumored RIM BlackBerry KickStart, and to touchscreen phones with the as-yet unannounced BlackBerry Thunder, the Canadians also seem to have barely started their expansion into Nokia's consumer-centric domain.
Only time will tell what the outcome of this battle will be, but there's one thing for sure, the idea of openness among the big players will be a relative one for quite a few more years to come.
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