Blackberry gets competition

Blackberry's virtual monopoly on the email-on-the-move market is under threat from a portable email service in the pipeline from Microsoft and Vodafone. Windows Mobile Email will be launched in Britain, France and Germany say the two groups.

The device, which will attempt to break Blackberry's stranglehold on the portable email market, will let users edit Microsoft Word and Excel documents, as well as send and receive emails. Vodafone, Orange and T-Mobile are among 15 mobile operators who have joined forces to offer a 'fire and forget' service, which they say will go head-to-head with existing instant messaging (IM) services offered by the likes of Yahoo!, MSN and Skype.

The cost of the service is being kept under wraps while more partners are signed up, but the operators see it as a potentially huge boost to their revenue lines. IM will be launched in the UK in the next few months but will require most users to splash out on new, IM-compatible, handsets.

However, industry experts were sceptical that IM would simply cannibalise operators' revenues from existing text-messaging services.

- INDEPENDENT