In a series of announcements this week, mobile handset makers RIM and Nokia have posted notice that they are about to launch attacks on each other’s turf.

 

RIM, which owns more than half of the enterprise mobile phone market, announced a series of deals geared to attracting consumers.  

 

The Waterloo, Ontario-based firm unveiled a personal radio app deal with Slacker; a remote control TV deal with TiVo; a social networking deal with MySpace; and a Live Search deal with Microsoft. (see RIM-Microsoft to Fight Google, Yahoo in Mobile Search and TiVo, RIM Extend TV Remote to BlackBerry and Blackberry-MySpace Poor Cousin of iPhone-Facebook)

 

On the other hand Nokia, which is easily the best-known brand among consumers worldwide, announced a deal with Microsoft that would install Microsoft Exchange as a native app on 80 million of its phones. (see Nokia Dials in Microsoft Exchange)

 

Microsoft Exchange is the world’s most popular enterprise email server technology.

 

Nokia also announced that it is beefing up its business and technology support for VC-backed mobile application developers, and it plans to add new third-party business hooks to its growing list of native apps on its phones.

 

“These are two adjacent circles starting to overlap, and while it may be RIM versus Nokia today, ultimately it will be RIM versus Microsoft,” said Richard Windsor, an analyst with Nomura.

 

RIM will begin bumping heads with Microsoft, which owns the largest share of the enterprise computing market and a chunk of the mobile enterprise with Windows Mobile, Mr. Windsor said.

 

“My mother would not buy a BlackBerry, she would buy a Nokia phone, so the consumer market RIM is aiming at is really the ‘prosumer’ – business-oriented consumers that place a high value on email,” he said.

 

Still, Nokia is taking dead aim at the enterprise market and it is betting that innovative applications that take advantage of emerging mobile technologies such as location-aware services will help drive corporate demand.

 

“Our developer program will seek to improve the value proposition of our offerings in the enterprise, consumer, and ‘prosumer’ markets,” said Rob Taylor, director of Forum Nokia Americas.

 

But the mobile enterprise market, which is still in its early stages, promises much higher hardware margins, higher data revenue, and a solid appetite for software apps that port traditional business apps to cell phones.