Perhaps acknowledging that the long reign of its BlackBerry PDA in mobile email will come to an end, RIM said it would provide software later this year to run BlackBerry applications on third party systems, including Microsoft Windows Mobile. This would make RIM less dependent on its own hardware as this comes under threat from other email optimized devices such as the Motorola Q, and would counter Microsoft’s efforts to push its own mobile messaging and mail solutions to the enterprise base, as an alternative to BlackBerry.
RIM has struggled to match the pricing that companies like Microsoft and Nokia can offer, since they are often including mobile email in larger corporate contracts tied to other products such as Microsoft Exchange. Creating a client software for Exchange and Windows could solve this problem, spreading the BlackBerry applications to new devices without forcing companies to commit to the whole RIM server software platform if they are already wedded to another system.
The new BlackBerry application suite will appear as an icon on the screen of a non-RIM device. When clicked, it will run the BlackBerry suite, while preserving the ability to run Windows Mobile applications. It will include support for BlackBerry email, phone, calendar, address book, browser and instant messaging, among other options, via BlackBerry Enterprise Server and BlackBerry Internet Service. The new software also will allow third party applications and integrate with other servers.