Blackberry faces tougher, cheaper competition

It must not be the greatest week for the folks at Research In Motion (RIM) this week with all the recent downer coverage. Reuters reports that "Nokia and Microsoft are almost giving away software to muscle into the wireless e-mail business now dominated" by RIM. According to the article, "around 1 percent of the world's 650 million corporate e-mail accounts are plugged into hardware and software that forwards incoming messages to a mobile device. More than half of those, about 3.65 million, use RIM's BlackBerry."

Andrew Neff at Bear Stearns said, "For now, Blackberry is the only game in town and pricing it that way." The article then goes on to detail those costs to the enterprise. It also states Nokia is "willing to take a long-term view of the market, because the pay-off does not have to be in sales of server software but in potential sales of thousands of Nokia phones to employees at a company in order to read their wireless e-mails."

Ben Wood at Gartner said, "When all is said and done, Nokia is primarily a mobile phone company. Any additional activities are largely incremental."