Smartphone Battle: Blackberry and Treo Go Head to Head

Last Thursday, Palm Inc. made its first move. Forming strategic partnerships with Microsoft and Vodafone, the Sunnyvale, Calif., company plans to roll new mobile phones into markets currently dominated by RIM.

Blackberry and Palm's new Treo will be competing on the Vodafone wireless network in Western Europe, setting up a battle to see who can best cater to the needs of large businesses.

With mobile device growth in Western Europe increasing 25 percent this year, and over 3.2 million mobile devices sold since May alone, Palm wants to ride the trend, aiming to "accelerate geographic expansion" and "serve more European customers" – expanding into RIM territory.

"This collaboration," according to John Hartnett, Palm senior VP of worldwide sales, "will provide a powerful tool for enterprise customers," the core of Blackberry business.

But this isn’t the first time RIM has been challenged. Last year mobile heavy weights Nokia and HP contended for their own share of the lucrative mobile enterprise market but RIM still managed record shipments, enjoying 85 percent growth. Can it manage to defend itself against Palm's new triple alliance?

Trio for Treo

Palm is calling upon the expertise of Microsoft to provide the software infrastructure necessary to go head to head with RIM.

The newly formed relationship calls upon the Redmond Giant to power not only the back-end infrastructure that will deliver the mail, but also power the device itself using a mobile flavor of the Windows operating system.

Palm hopes that the Microsoft software will free the company from the problems that plagued its own code and stymied adoption of its previous Treo offerings.