Nokia smartphones to access IBM Lotus Notes corporate email

Nokia and IBM have decided to let the Finnish major’s smartphones access IBM Lotus Notes corporate email. This is expected to go on stream from next month onwards. Smartphones are seen as a market segment with the best hope for growth in 2009.

The move, likely to help Nokia fight it out on a higher plane with Blackberry-maker RIM, will help more than 80 million users of Nokia smart phones to access IBM’s Lotus email. The Lotus Notes partnership is expected to enable Nokia to mobilize close to 90 percent of corporate emails without any extra investments from corporations.

The new announcement is significant considering that it comes against a backdrop of falling demand for mobile handsets globally owing to recessionary trends. Nokia had been saying that it expects industry volumes in 2009 to plummet. The handset maker had abandoned plans to develop its own corporate email product this year. It had earlier decided to go for its own  corporate email product . It is believed that many companies have servers in place and a lot of Nokia devices on the premises.

Post-decision to drop its plan, Nokia has been focusing more on battling the challenge from RIM and Microsoft. Nokia had posted sales figures of 1.1 million of its new sleek, full-keyboard E71 phones, outselling RIM’s business user-targeted Blackberry Bold by five-to-one.  With IBM stopping by, adding support for Lotus Notes has come as a new venture. The move gives Nokia the capability to target a much broader market and a segment where RIM has dominated to date, said industry sources.

Nokia, in the meanwhile, has hit the market with a stripped-down version of E71, the Nokia E63. The model is expected to be available for a retail price of 199 euros . This significantly is almost half the E71s estimated retail price unveiled in June.