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They've held out for years, stuck steadfastly to first Palm, them Microsoft-based smart phones to serve email up to bureaucrats and businesspeople on the move. Now Telecom will begin selling the ultimate portable email device - the Blackberry. But not just any sort of Blackberry, a worldmode Blackberry.
That means you'll be able to take it overseas with you, to Australia (where Telstra is about to pull the plug on CDMA) and 119 other countries where you can roam for voice and data now that Telecom has struck deals with GSM carriers. Vodafone has had the Blackberry in New Zealand for years and apparently it has been very successful for them.
As Vodafone PR man Paul Brislen told me last month: "Blackberry sales in NZ have doubled year on year and there's no sign of it slowing down. We sell five times as many Blackberrys as we do Windows Mobile devices even though there are only two Blackberrys, the Pearl and the Curve versus five or six Widows Mobile boxes."
The Blackberry is most popular among big corporates and Goverment departments, because it involves a dedicated mail server being hosted by the company (a web based version of the Blackberry mail platform will be made available by Telecom early next year).
Telecom, with its dominance in the big business telco scene is well aided by the Blackberry's arrival. The device, dubbed the "Crackberry" in the US is hugely popular with management types who need constant email access. Other devices do push email quite well, but none seem to impress as much as the Blackberry, which continues to sell like hotcakes.
Telecom's general manager of business solutions, Greg McAllister, told me that the Blackberrys would initially be released into the market to corporate through Telecom's IT arm Gen-i.
"We're not far away from doing a deal with RIM to launch the worldmode Blackberry," he said.
The deal is a direct one struck with Research In Motion, the Blackberry's maker, rather than US carrier Sprint, who Telecom has in the past placed orders through to increase its bargaining power with handset makers.
The worldmode Blackberry will help solve the problems created by Telstra's looming shutdown of its CDMA network.
Also, Telecom says it will have the Okta Mondo clamshell worldmode phone in the market by December 20 and "three or four in the new year including a couple of PDAs." One of the new PDAs will be a version of Samsung's Blackjack device. Today I had a look at a new LG Groove phone which looks very Asian in style and has an FM transmitter so you can play music stored on it through your car stereo system. It will also sell the Solio solar-power mobile phone charger, which I'm sure will be very useful for DOC workers and loggers.
Some other developments at Telecom have been flag posted for next year. The company is overhauling its voice mail system so there'll be room for more stored messages which you'll be able to hang onto for longer. That's good, I hate how you get prompted to delete old messages every ten days.
Telecom will get into software-as-a-service in a big way next year with what is tentatively dubbed "Business Service Platform". It's basically a unified messaging platform that plugs into CRM and payroll functions. I'm picking Telecom hooks up with Microsoft for this as the latter recently launched its unified communications platform here and the two have had a strong relationship traditionally.
Also, Telecom has been doing a lot of customer surveys following the YahooXtra Bubble debacle and on the basis of that will be changing its marketing focus to try and tell people what the service actually delivers. The X meets Y ads showing the couple kissing just aren't doing it, it seems. Telecom will also launch a free security suite to subscribers early next year.
