Nokia today announced plans to bring a Symbian OS-based BlackBerry Connect solution to market on its Nokia Series 80-based mobile devices like the Nokia 9500 Communicator. The Nokia 9500 Communicator will be able to connect to BlackBerry services from Research In Motion (RIM), including support for BlackBerry Enterprise Server and BlackBerry Internet Service, enabling push-based email, attachment viewing and calendar access.
Nokia’s mobile devices based on the Series 80 platform are typified by a rich and intuitive user interface. The Nokia Communicator family represents a state-of-the-art Series 80 product, that has a full QWERTY keyboard and multi-way scroll, or ‘joystick’ for easy user interface navigation. With the Series 80 device, professionals are able to read, view and edit attachments, reply, and effectively manage their email inbox. The Symbian Operating System is the most robust and optimized OS for mobile business devices. Series 80 is a standards-based development platform providing an excellent open programming environment for top-performance enterprise applications.
“Nokia works in cooperation with innovative companies such as Research In Motion and Symbian to bring the most feature-rich mobile solutions to the market,” said Niklas Savander, Senior Vice President of Nokia Enterprise Solutions’ Mobile Device unit. “By expanding our range of business devices that are enabled with BlackBerry connectivity, we provide customers a broader choice of devices that best suit their workstyle or lifestyle.”
For individuals and smaller businesses, BlackBerry Internet Service allows push-based access to multiple existing business and/or personal email accounts from a single device. For corporate customers, BlackBerry Enterprise Server software tightly integrates with Microsoft Exchange or IBM Lotus Domino (Novelle Groupwise support is expected to be available later this year) to enable secure, push-based, wireless access to email and calendar.
Nokia was the first mobile phone manufacturer to offer BlackBerry-enabled mobile phones. The Nokia 6820 messaging device, enabled with BlackBerry email connectivity, has been available since February 2004.