RIM inks email deal with Palm

Former rivals RIM and Palm have signed a deal to offer RIM's BlackBerry wireless email service on Palm's Treo 650 smartphone.

The deal has been agreed under RIM's BlackBerry Connect licensing programme, which extends BlackBerry-like services to other vendors' devices and is expected to affect buyers by early 2006.

Rob Bamforth, senior analyst at Quocirca, maintained that the deal could benefit both companies.

"This looks good if RIM is serious about such BlackBerry Connect deals. But it has to balance the benefit of the licence arrangement with the fact that it could affect its own market share," he said.

"Meanwhile, as Palm has deals with Seven, Visto and Good Technology, it is perhaps a sign that it feels a need to address the higher end of the market with the BlackBerry solution.

"Although Palm has had a difficult year, there are signs that it is making some positive announcements."

RIM has 3.5 million subscribers worldwide and added 60,000 subscribers during its last quarter. Co-chief executive Jim Balsillie claimed that the deal shows that RIM is serious about selling its software and email services on competing devices.

But critics have suggested that many hardware makers have shunned BlackBerry Connect.

In the US only Nokia's 9300 handset uses the software, raising the question of whether RIM is fully committed to a more software-centric strategy for its business.

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