Microsoft & Nokia team up to go after RIM
by The PocketBerry Team
“This is really about creating a formidable challenge for RIM rather than anyone else,” said the Nokia executive vice president Kai Oistamo in a conference call Wednesday. It seems to be rather aggressive if you ask me. Nokia seems to be pissed about RIM and Apple’s small marketshare which is profiting greatly throughout the world. Basically Microsoft and Nokia are currently working together to bring up mobile versions of the Microsoft Office programs onto Nokia phones which run on the Symbian OS. In an interview, Nokia executive vice president Robert Andersson said that RIM has an almost dominant position in the North American market for mobile email. “That’s the application where they really are strong,” he said.
By bringing the full Office app to Symbian smartphones, Andersson said, Nokia hopes to do RIM one better. “What we are bring with this collaboration is a much deeper much richer experience.” The operation will take time, but companies are patient and working on it. “The first deliverable is next year,” Microsoft corporate vice president Takeshi Numoto said in an interview. “We’re not really talking about things beyond that.”
Given that, it seems reasonable to think it could well be until 2011 before the mobile versions of Excel, PowerPoint, Word, and OneNote make their way onto the first Symbian phones, and even then the rollout will start with just the eSeries of devices.
Microsoft and Nokia started discussions about six months ago, but the work has centred on finalising the business details.
The deal does not necessarily mean that Nokia will rock Windows Mobile devices as they are not interested in any operating system other than their Symbian.
RIM has competitors coming its way, but it’s not like they are getting cornered in any way due to future plans we may or may not know they have in store. This Microsoft and Nokia expenditure is nothing but general news brought upfront to the public, while RIM most likely has plenty of tricks up their sleeve.
-by Mac Jadalhack
Source: Silicon
