Airtel introduces BlackBerry Personal Mail service plan at Rs 499 p.m.

In a new service plan laid out by Airtel and Research In Motion (RIM), the Indian Airtel user will now be provided with unlimited email and instant messaging (IM) on BlackBerry smartphones for just Rs 499 per month. The new plan is called Blackberry Personal Mail.

Photo: Blackberry Storm touchscreen phone

The BlackBerry Personal Mail service plan offers unlimited access to the industry-leading email and instant messaging features on the BlackBerry platform, allowing Airtel customers to access up to 10 supported POP3/IMAP email accounts (including most popular ISP email accounts such as Yahoo! Mail and Google Mail) as well as various instant messaging services (including Windows Live Messenger, GTalk, Yahoo! Messenger and BlackBerry® Messenger) from a single device.

Sanjay Gupta, Chief Marketing Officer, Mobile Services, Airtel was optimistic regarding the new plan. “With the BlackBerry Personal Mail service plan, we are extending the market to a wider segment, allowing customers such as young professionals, small business owners and students to access their email on the move and stay seamlessly connected with instant messaging on their BlackBerry smartphones,” he said.

Ms. Frenny Bawa, Vice President, India at Research In Motion said that working with Airtel was a delightful experience.”We are pleased to work with Airtel to bring the rich communications features and unique user experience offered by the BlackBerry solution in a unique offering to customers in India. The new BlackBerry Personal Mail service plan from Airtel is an attractive offering that will enable more users to choose and enjoy BlackBerry smartphones.” she said.

Telemedia services, which is a business sub-unit of Bharti Airtel, provides the customers with the broadband and telephone services and the plan will be executed under this unit. The other Airtel business subunits are Mobile services and Enterprise services.

RIM on the other hand is a leading designer, manufacturer and marketer of innovative wireless solutions for the worldwide mobile communications market. RIM provides platforms and solutions for seamless access to time-sensitive information including email, phone, SMS messaging, Internet and intranet-based applications.

RIM, Research In Motion and BlackBerry are registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and may be pending or registered in other countries.

Airtel aims to have an aggregate of over 91 million customers as of end of January 2009, consisting of 88.38 million mobile customers in india and Srilanka.