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Nokia Woos the Business Market More BlackBerry-Equipped Handsets and a Sleeker Smart Phone

Posted on: Wednesday, 8 September 2004, 06:00 CDT

In an attempt to increase its share of the business market, the mobile phone maker Nokia on Tuesday announced a sleeker version of its Communicator smart phone and expanded the number of mobile phones equipped with the BlackBerry e-mail application, a tool that many executives already use.

The popularity of BlackBerry, a mobile e-mail service created by Research in Motion, has spread from the United States to Europe and Asia over the past 18 months.

BlackBerry's e-mail application is used by business professionals and others who like combining a mobile phone and instant wireless e- mail in a single device. RIM makes the hardware and software but also licenses the application to manufacturers like Nokia, Siemens and Sony Ericsson.

BlackBerry e-mail is now offered by mobile operators throughout Europe, including Vodafone, T-Mobile, Orange, SFR and Telefonica, said Chris Jones, an analyst at the British technology consultancy Canalys.

Nokia said it had decided to expand the number of phones offering BlackBerry because business customers were asking for it. The company's Enterprise Solutions group was recently formed to increase sales to corporate customers.

Nokia, the world's largest maker of cellphones, has struggled to stem a decline in its market share. The company achieved a small gain, to 29.7 percent in the second quarter, according to market research from Gartner.

Last year, International Business Machines and Nokia announced that they would jointly develop software and systems to let businesspeople gain access to corporate networks securely while traveling. It is a small but important market, with growth potential that Nokia, Microsoft and others are increasingly trying to address.

When Nokia first introduced the Communicator smart phone several years ago smart phones have many of the attributes of laptop computers it was the only device on the market with a Qwerty keyboard format.

Now there are a number of competing products, including Motorola's MPx, which uses the Microsoft operating system, PalmOne's Treo 600 and Siemens's SK65, said Ben Wood, a mobile analyst in the London office of Gartner.

The latest addition to the Communicator family, the 9300, is a more compact tri-mode world phone, with a Qwerty keyboard, color screen and joystick for navigation. The phone, which will be available in the first quarter of 2005 and is expected to retail for around 700, or $846, will integrate infrared and Bluetooth for connecting wirelessly with other devices and will include BlackBerry Connect as an e-mail option.

Nokia said BlackBerry's e-mail client will also be included in the Communicator 9500 and other phones based on the Symbian Series 80 operating system.

A report from Canalys in June showed that RIM was the fourth- largest vendor of mobile devices in the first quarter, with 6.4 percent of the global market, behind Nokia, PalmOne and Hewlett- Packard.

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