This will help launch Nokia into markets less dependent upon their hardware where they are seeing lots of competition and pricing pressure from rivals like Motorola:
Nokia Business Center, as the new e-mail system is to be known, seeks to bridge the gap between the world’s 650 million corporate e-mail accounts and the elite of about 10 million who have mobile access to their business e-mail inboxes.
The Finnish group, long expected to push into a market which brought success to Research in Motion’s (RIM) Blackberry devices, said it wanted to make e-mail more cost-effective and available on a wider range of phones.
“We are trying to bring e-mail to the masses by taking it out of the realm of just CEOs and the highly paid sales force,” said Dave Grannan, head of Nokia’s e-mail business. …
“Nokia’s focus is much broader than that of RIM … it has intelligent networks which understand handsets, delivering services the user wants.
“Smartphones are not smartphones without the services from the network side,” he added.
Thirteen Nokia mobile devices will be certified to work on the e-mail system by the end of the year. But it would fall flat if it only worked on Nokia devices.
Grannan said Nokia planned to certify rival handsets to work with its e-mail system and in principle, any smartphone that runs Java technology can qualify.
Nokia would focus on certifying other high-volume Java mobile phones first, including models from Motorola Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd.