BlackBerry Faces Tough Competition from Identical Services

With the growing market for smartphones and booming range of handsets in the market, consumers today demand no less than the best.

The conflict between the Blackberry and the government has created uncertainty for the users. The government has given time to RIM, the Canadian firm that provides Blackberry services, until end of January 2011 to give its intelligence agencies full access to all the services.

Since Blackberry has locked horns with the Indian government, it leaves immense market for many Blackberry like services launching in the Indian market.

Market is bombarded with Blackberry like services and handsets. Growth in the Asia-Pacific smartphone market is expected to skyrocket in the coming years and by 2015, Frost & Sullivan forecasts that 54% of all the devices sold in the region will be smartphones. The sales of smartphones could double from about 200 mn this year to 400 mn in 2014, say the analysts at ABI Research.

We are here bringing to you few the latest Blackberry like services, which have already snatched the limelight from Blackberry on to themselves, to an extent.

Bharat Berry - The Desi Blackberry

Bharat Berry is currently offered on Blackberry handsets, and soon it will be available on all kinds of Symbian and Android based handsets.

Data Infosys recently announced to offer Bharat Berry service, which the company claimed to be an alternative to the controversial BlackBerry services. Bharat Berry services have run into rough weather with the government over interception of its data.

The issue that the online usage of Blackberry phones could be monitored by the government would be fully solved with the services of Bharat Berry, a country-made compliant product designed keeping in consideration all the necessary Indian laws and works with all the Blackberry and other phones the company had claimed.

“The service provides advanced push-mail on Blackberry handsets and ensures that the user remains connected to email, calendar, and contacts through the servers hosted in India,” says Ajay Data, founder and CEO, Data Infosys.

Bharat Berry works through a mix of its very advanced email server known as XGeNPlus and open source technologies.

Besides, unlike Blackberry, which has servers outside the country making interception difficult, Bharat Berry's servers are hosted in India, in compliance with the security demands.

“Unchecked terrorist activities are the major concern of security agencies, as it can escape detection by using Blackberry's coded services. We are providing a concrete solution to the problem that has left lakhs of Blackberry phone users in limbo,” says Ajay Data.

Bharat Berry allows online access to the calendar items and contacts. The service can be used on existing Blackberry handsets. Blackberry has a huge user base, but the policy troubles it has run into might not be lasting.

Data Infosys is in talks with handset makers, including Huawei and Micromax, for providing Internet and enterprise services on all smartphones. Bharat Berry says their applications can be used on all the handsets, while a Blackberry service works only on the handsets produced by Canada's Research in Motion. “You lose your complete data, if your Blackberry device is lost. But with Bharat Berry your data is secured on a server, even if you lose your handset,” he says. Data claimed that the new service from Data Infosys also rules out any security threat, as its servers are hosted in India. “Security agencies can have complete access to communication over Bharat Berry,” he adds.

Rediffmail NG - For the Masses

With rediffmail NG, the next generation email service from Rediff.com, India's 670 mn mobile phone users now have the advantage of being able to send and receive unlimited email, look up contacts and assign tasks to the calendar, and set reminders with the same ease from mobile devices as from their PC.

“Globally, the mobile application economy is gaining momentum and companies are slowly shifting to a subscription based revenue model. We believe our rediffmail NG initiative is a first step in this direction, and we have plans to continue to take advantage of the growing demand for data driven solutions.” says Ajit Balakrishnan, chairman and CEO of Rediff.com India.

Rediffmail NG works across almost all mobile phone platforms including Symbian, Java, and Android, as well as on almost all mobile phones in the market (close to 200 models from over 2 dozen manufacturers), including all entry level phones which cost as little as `2,000.

BlacMail

BlacMail has been in the news lately for its push mail services, which are very similar to the Blackberry. Like the Blackberry, BlacMail is a server based push mail service, while the Blackberry service is targeted at its own phones; the BlacMail service is agnostic to phone manufacturer models and works on most Java and Symbian based phones. BlacMail is targeted at the vast middle market in India, which is atleast 50 times larger than the niche push mail solutions such as the Blackberry. Thus, the service will be considerably more affordable than the alternatives.

BlacMail is compliant with all the government's lawful intercept conditions essential to offer email push services in India and other countries. BlacMail platform incorporates strong proprietary encryption methods constructed to work efficiently even on phones with low computing resources.

“BlacMail will be launched by the nation's leading mobile telecom operators soon. We are already partnering with BSNL, the sole 3G service provider today, and plan to get a headstart with the next version of BlacMail, as other operators prepare for their respective 3G launch. We will announce the first of our partnership with large mobile phone manufacturers and telecom operators in September as part of launch of BlacMail on their platforms,” says Krishna Mohan, CEO, Fifth C Solutions.

Rcom Enters the Arena

Reliance Communications (Rcom) also announced the launch of 'Blackberry like' push email services directly to the mobile phones in association with Canadian firm Iseemedia, a leading push mail client provider.

Reliance Mobile's ground-breaking SMS based push email service is now available to Reliance GSM and CDMA subscribers across India at the fixed monthly service charges of `30 and a usage tariff of 0.50 paise per SMS sent by subscribers.

The iSeeMail solution is architected to utilize any available interface for providing full access to emails. This unique multi-modal approach offers subscribers to access emails using multiple interfaces such as SMS, MMS, WAP/XHTML and OMA-EMN.

“Iseemedia provides the ideal platform to deliver our next generation service to drive more email usage among our existing subscribers,” says Krishna Durbha, head, VAS, Reliance Communications.

Nokia's Knock Out to Blackberry

Nokia launched a newer, improved version of Nokia Messaging with free push email service such as Gmail, Yahoo!, Rediffmail, Sify, and Indiatimes amongst others. Nokia's email solution removes the barriers and prohibitive costs associated with mobile email.

It is compatible to all Nokia Symbian devices. Currently, the services have been extended to even the mass market devices like C3. The service is made available through all leading operators in the country and consumers need to pay only the GPRS data charges.

Also, Nokia's Instant messaging service enables the users to mobilize all the popular chat clients like Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger or Google Talk straight on the Nokia device. The chat client allows the users to have multiple conversations across multiple communities at the same time, change their status by community, and manage their buddy lists. It aggregates all the consumer email accounts through 1 client, ensuring easy toggling from 1 email account to another, without closing the existing email account, and without having to go through the web browser.

“We believe that the expected 3G technologies will allow for expeditious and cost-effective methods of delivering broadband Internet access to the mass market, in turn creating demand for services from the consumer,” says Raju Sastry, head of Go To Market, software and services portfolio, Nokia India.
With fast growing economy, improving living standards of Indian society and cut-throat competition in mobility sector, we are now living in a world where easy resourceful and high-end facilities can be availed at reasonable rates. So, who says we cannot proxy Blackberry? Now, we have a reason too!

Akanksha Singh
Akankshas@cybermedia.co.in