Mobiles Continue to Announce Moves

The world of mobile continues to push forward with ever increasing announcements:

RIM (Research In Motion) are launching a flip version of its popular BlackBerry Pearl smartphone, loaded with multimedia features such as a video and music player and a 2-megapixel camera with flash, as well as a Web browser and an abridged keyboard.

RIM has more than 16 million subscribers and claim that some 40% are “non-enterprise" customers (small and medium businesses and consumers). This drive to secure the retail consumers places them now in direct competition with Apple, Motorola, Samsung, Sony and Nokia. This announcement comes hot on the heels of their Bold announcement and shows the rate of change taking place in this market.

Meanwhile, Deutsche Telekom's T-Mobile is reported to be weeks away from starting to sell a mobile phone based on Google's Android software. The rumour reported by Reuters intimated that Sept 23 was a likely date for the announcement.

Finally, Nokia said it will enable access to Microsoft's Exchange ActiveSync e-mail from all 80 million Nokia phones using latest edition of S60 software. Nokia users who use Exchange can now set up Mail for Exchange for free on their devices, without paying additional services or subscription fees.

So as the economy is flat the mobile market appears to remain buoyant. The questions are whether some players face a fall out and whether the rate of change cam be maintained?

Blackberry Boldly Moves Forward

Anyone who ever doubted that mobile convergence was upon us take note of the latest offer from BlackBerry who are set to release their ‘Bold’ version of its e-mailing mobile phone this month. The new phone, will allow users to talk while sending e-mails and accessing the internet. This feature rich model has built in WiFi high speed transfer, on board GPS receiver, a 2-megapixel camera, a 3.5mm headphone input to plug in your favourite headphones and to all this add the good keyboard , long battery life and the Brackberry folk will be very happy.

The model itself is still a heavyweight, but as most still come as ‘office furniture’ that the boss pays for, who going to complain?