3GSM World Congress
Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications and Research In Motion (RIM) today announced their plans to enable BlackBerry connectivity on Sony Ericsson mobile phones. The first product to feature BlackBerry services will be the P900 Symbian OS smartphone later this year.
Sony Ericsson and RIM recently signed an agreement to enable Sony Ericsson’s Symbian OS based phones to connect to BlackBerry Enterprise Server and BlackBerry Web Client services for enterprises and individual users. The BlackBerry services infrastructure and platform has been approved and deployed by operators around the world and thousands of companies and government organisations have already installed BlackBerry Enterprise Server behind their firewall.
The combination of RIM’s ‘always on’ connectivity and push technology that automatically delivers emails and other data to and from a wireless device, makes BlackBerry an efficient and reliable communications platform. The BlackBerry services will be able to run on the P900, while maintaining the existing P900 experience and functionality. BlackBerry connectivity support on the P900 is expected later this year.
“We’re delighted to be adding BlackBerry connectivity to the palette of solutions we support with our smartphones, thereby further expanding customer choice. The P900 smartphone is a multi-faceted device which offers productivity, entertainment and communications and our agreement with RIM ensures our customers a proven, market-leading mobile e-mail and data solution,” says Jan Wareby, Executive Vice President and Head of Sales and Marketing of Sony Ericsson.
“We are pleased to be working with Sony Ericsson to provide our end-user customers and carrier partners with greater wireless device choices while enabling IT departments to leverage their existing BlackBerry infrastructure,” said Don Morrison, Chief Operating Officer at Research In Motion.
“IT departments and consumers are recognizing the productivity benefits that can be gained from wireless access to corporate data and email,” said Marit Doving, EVP, Marketing, Symbian. “By adding BlackBerry Connect to the P900, RIM has enabled Sony Ericsson to further exploit the rich functionality of Symbian OS.”
The BlackBerry architecture for enterprise customers includes back-end integration with corporate information systems, enhanced manageability and end-to-end security. BlackBerry for individual users enables push-based access to one or multiple internet-based email accounts without the need for a corporate IT platform.
The P900 is a high-quality communications tool for voice calls, text and picture messaging and e-mail, as well as providing full PDA/organizer functions. In addition, it is a camera-phone capable of recording video and still images and also provides a good gaming experience on the 65K colour touch-screen. The wide range of applications available for download enables the P900 to do much more than making voice calls, thereby increasing its value for both consumers and operators. The P900 is based on Symbian OS v7.0 and the established UIQ user interface.