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Wireless carriers bet on mobile mail
Other competitors try building on the success of the Blackberry.
September 23, 2005: 4:05 PM EDT
By Om Malik, Business 2.0

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NEW YORK (Business 2.0) - Over the past few years, Research in Motion's BlackBerrys have become synonymous with e-mail on the go. The innovative gadgets -- which rely on a simple user interface and a seamless back-end e-mail server to deliver customers' e-mail to their mobile phones -- have become so popular that they're often known as "crackberrys."

Based largely on the success of this service, Canada-based RIM has evolved from a tiny upstart into a company that earned $1.35 billion in revenue last year.

Now RIM's success has attracted the attention of a slew of competitors eager to capture part of the lucrative mobile e-mail market. In partnerships with wireless carriers like Cingular and Verizon (Research), rival e-mail developers such as Good Technology and Intellisync are developing mobile e-mail products to challenge RIM's dominance, aiming to make it simple to receive e-mail on a variety of new cell phones and PDAs.

A fast-growing service

It's easy to see why: Mobile e-mail is one of the fastest-growing cell-phone services, and one that both consumers and businesses are clamoring for.

The Radicati Group, a Palo Alto-based market research firm, predicts that nearly 123 million consumers will check e-mail on their handsets by 2009, up from just 6.5 million this year. At an eye-popping growth rate of more than 100 percent a year, Radicati expects mobile e-mail to become a $2 billion market in just four years.

This has led to an explosion of activity as wireless carriers and phone vendors scramble to carve out a chunk of the fast-growing market. Cingular recently partnered with Good, based in Santa Clara, Calif., to offer wireless e-mail to subscribers for about $45 a month.

In July, Sprint announced a deal with Seven, a Silicon Valley-based software developer, to deliver e-mail to select Sprint phones. Next month Nokia plans to start selling its e-mail-friendly 9300 smartphone in the United States; Hewlett-Packard (Research) also hopes to knock the BlackBerry off its throne with the iPaq 6515, a high-end PDA designed to make it easy to send and receive e-mail.

Concentrating on proven success

Like ringtones and text messaging before it, mobile e-mail should prove popular with consumers because it's easy to use and helps them stay in touch with one another.

Considering that carriers have spent millions of dollars on unproven technologies such as mobile television, it's a smart move for them to concentrate instead on what BlackBerry's success has shown: that corporate executives are willing to pay a lot of money to get their e-mail on the go.

In a recent report, an investment banker at San Francisco-based Rutberg & Co. noted that "carrier-resold solutions [such as Good's offering through Cingular] are gaining significant momentum, across small, medium, and large enterprise markets."

If mobile e-mail becomes a multibillion-dollar market, it will prove that in the wireless world, it's the applications that are simplest to use that make the most money.

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