Palm Licenses The RIM Blackberry Platform

The big news for the day is Palm licensing RIM's push email platform for use in Treos. The announcement has been received quite favorably by the analyst community.

Tim Bajarin at Creative Strategies posts at Technology Pundits that it is a wise move by RIM, "whose future lies in getting their email platform on as many devices as possible." He believes the moove will ensure that the "Blackberry platform will have a future regardless of the competition from Palm and the Windows Mobile crowd. And RIM Blackberry users, who have millions invested in the Blackberry services, can now have the choice of using the best selling smart phone on the market in the Treo." Bajarin also adds that:

This deal also gives Palm an even broader entry into enterprise accounts. Last month the company announced they would also do a Palm Treo that used the Windows Mobile OS. Up to now, RIM’s Blackberry service and Windows Mobile dominated the enterprise when it came to volume purchases and large scale IT deployments of hand held computers. But with this move, Palm gives the Treo the enviable position of being the only great smart phone that can use all three major business friendly operating systems. This also gives them an edge over HP, Dell and other Microsoft Windows Mobile partners in the battle for the hearts and minds of business customers.

Michael Gartenberg posts at the Jupiter Analyst Weblogs that:

Palm is changing. It used to be about offering everything and those choices either worked for you or didn't. Either you liked Palm OS and the email offering they were selling or you went elsewhere. Today it seems Palm is about choice and letting their customers decide. It also means Palm is becoming technology agnostic, as long as they sell Treo's. Want Windows Mobile and Exchange? No problem. Prefer Blackberry on the back end? That's ok too. In a world where device decisions are decided more and more directly by end users, Palm is keeping things flexible so IT can deploy whatever users select. That's a move that's likely to increase their growth over time.

Over at the New York Times, John Jackson at the Yankee Group said, "It would have been a bigger deal if they hadn't done it. It's a must-have."

With the market for smartphone expected to grow significantly, Jackson added, "It's a highly lucrative market that is widely perceived as being under-addressed."

Michael Gartenberg at JupiterResearch said about Palm that, "It's a good idea for them to let the market decide" what software and hardware combinations customers can have. "You don't want to back your customers into a corner."

In a Bloomberg article, Rob Enderle said, "Palm helps validate the RIM platform. At the same time this gives Palm a tremendous amount of breadth into the corporate environment."

Avi Greengart at Current Analysis commented that Palm wants to be "the Switzerland of e-mail. This is a big deal for Palm. They need to sell every device they can."

Regarding RIM's patent dispute with NTP and Nokia striking a deal with NTP as well early in the Summer, Pablo Perez- Fernandez at ThinkEquity Research said, "Nokia couldn't take the risk of putting out a BlackBerry phone in the U.S. market and not be covered. They did it as a hedge and it was the smartest thing to do.''

Lastly at the RED HERRING, Avi Greengart at Current Analysis said, "It’s certainly something they need to do. Palm is competing against very large companies and they need to make the product as desirable and accessible as possible. Palm is trying to make itself completely neutral with email, where you can use just about any email system you can,” he added.

Greengart noted no carriers were announced so he predicted Blackberry supporting Treos would be avaialble in 2006. He added, "Given their problem with the Palm OS and Access, they have to do something. It would be better if they could do something more quickly. But it’s a win for Palm and for RIM."