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As CTIA is about to get underway in San Francisco, Nokia dropped the bombshell that they will be expanding the presence of Microsoft Exchange Activesync on their Symbian based smartphones. In fact, it will be embedded on all Nokia phones that use the S60 Symbian operating system from now on, which includes 43 different models of Nokia phones currently, numbering 80 million actual devices in the field, and all N and E Series Nokia phones down the line.

Nokia announced several weeks ago that they were dropping support for Blackberry accounts from their smartphones, but the expectation was that customers would use Symbian’s native email program. Now the expansion of MS Exchange from kludgy support in a few stray Nokia models to embedded in the entire line is another major shot across RIM’s bow for a stake in the US smartphone market. Of course, Nokia has never had much of a foothold in the US, despite being the major phone vendor in Europe and as RIM is still the undisputed champion in US smartphones, adding MS Exchange is hardly going to make them number one overnight.

However, it does fill a serious gap in their product especially as corporate email support is essential for any smartphone sold in the United States. All major vendors save RIM, including Palm, Motorola, Samsung and Apple implement ActiveSync in one manner or another and this signals that Nokia is serious about expanding their US market share.

An extra 80 million devices running ActiveSync with more to come is also a major win for Microsoft as it continues to battle RIM, Apple and soon Google in the highly competitive smartphone/mobile email market.

Zealot (468 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!).