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In a move apparently designed to bring more differentiation to the smartphone market, Nokia has stated they are dropping BlackBerry Connect support from their business-oriented E-series smartphones. In a statement to customers; the Europhone powerhouse said the following:

RIM are a competitor and have done a reasonable job in a space that is traditionally ours, so it’s no great surprise that we see this as an opportunity to give consumers a proper choice on what email solution they want.

“A space that is traditionally ours”…? Those are fighting words. Nokia’s new E-71 QUERTY smartphone lacks all trace of the ability to make use of RIMs email services, so that the only option is Nokia’s own email service which according to many users is not ready for prime time. Hopefully the feature will improve fast now that Nokia’s massive customer base will not have the option to use BlackBerry emailing instead on Nokia handsets.

Beyond being a somewhat logical business move to push their own brand in the massively lucrative mobile email business, in the long term this will further handicap Nokia smartphones in the US market. In the US BlackBerry has a very firm hold on the business and corporate email market, with WinMo in second. Symbian, the European smartphone OS of choice but already little seen in the US, will now have an even tougher row to hoe with a proprietary and substandard email client.

Zealot (469 Posts) - Website | Twitter | Facebook

By day a department manager and writer for a major network device vendor...by night Zealot stalks the mean magnetic streets, striking fear into the hearts of bandwidth abusers and theme park mascots. Zealot has been involved with mobile devices for more than a decade now, starting off with dumb phones, moving to PDAs and then to smartphones, notebooks and netbooks with the odd PMP thrown in. Most of his mobile time currently is spent on a Treo Pro, Zune HD, Thinkpad T61, Gigabyte M912M or a Hackintoshed Compaq Mini 704. He proudly groks the Geek community and considers himself a Neo Maxi Zune Dweebie (thanks Will Wheaton!).