RIM Announces Integrated Mobile Phone, Email, Organizer
Reuters is reporting that Research in Motion has announced a voice-enabled version of its BlackBerry e-mail device, placing it in competition with the Handspring Treo 180 and a number of other forthcoming integrated phone/messaging devices. The new device, called the BlackBerry 5810, looks exactly like the BlackBerry 957 which has the Personal Information Manager form factor. The major difference is that the new device adds an earbud-sized headset and a GSM SIM card.
The article suggests that Handspring is positioning the Treo 180 as a consumer device, while the Blackberry is aimed squarely at business. It's hard to justify statements like this, in our view, unless they are trying to say that Blackberry infrastructure (for email filtering and forwarding) may already exist in large North American corporations, while corresponding software will not exist for the Handspring device at the moment. On the other hand, the Handspring device is more of a pure GSM/GPRS device than the Blackberry, so the infrastructure to support it may already be deployed in Europe and Asia.