Nokia launches new corporate phone line-up

Finnish Mobile phone maker Nokia said on Wednesday it is launching three new mobile devices for business users, aiming to capture a bigger slice of the lucrative corporate market.

It said the E60, E61 and E70 phones would hit the shelves in the first quarter of next year and are designed to work with mobile e-mail systems like RIM's BlackBerry Connect as well as Nokia's own Business Center, which it launched last month to make e-mail available on a wider range of phones.

"On pricing, absolutely, we are going to be competitive. Obviously these are the devices we have high targets for," Niklas Savander, Senior Vice President at Nokia Enterprise Solutions unit, told a news conference in London.

They would also support mobile e-mail from Visto Mobile, Seven and Good Technology Inc, the company said.

The new devices include a range of GSM frequencies and 3G capability as well as WLAN and Bluetooth short-range radio technologies, differentiating them from some competitors, it added.

"This represents the first generation of the E-series family and certainly we expect to extend it over time," said Mary McDowell, head of the Nokia Enterprise corporate unit, reports Reuters.

According to ABC, the E70 runs the Symbian Series 60 smartphone operating system, which is more popular in Europe than it is here, but it has the requisite Web browsers, Microsoft Office document viewers and such. More excitingly, though, Blackberry Connect brings Blackberry e-mail to the smallest device ever with the E70 – you get the phone-like form factor of Blackberry's 7100t with a better screen and a real keyboard.

We're also excited about the E61, which looks a lot like a Blackberry or the upcoming Motorola Q. It's a 5.07 oz, slab-style phone (4.6" x 2.74" x.55") with a QWERTY keyboard and a 240x320, 16-million-color display. In may be brighter and richer than any we've ever seen on a handheld before. It has 75 MB of on-board memory, a mini-SD slot, Bluetooth, USB and Wi-Fi connections. There's more VOIP goodness here, too.

The E60 looks a lot more like a normal, candy-bar-style Nokia phone, without a QWERTY keyboard. But it has the Symbian smartphone OS and Wi-Fi to hook into corporate VOIP systems, along with another one of those gorgeous 16-million-color, 352x416-pixel displays.

The three phones will retail for around $420-540, Savander said. That's in line with Palm's smartphones, though it's a touch more expensive than RIM's Blackberries.

P.T.