Nokia acquires OZ in a play for phone-based e-mail

Yesterday, Nokia purchased a software vendor which competes against RIM's BlackBerry and Motorola's Good Technology Group. With these and lots of other changes now afoot, in which direction(s) is Nokia headed?

On the eve of the rollout of a new consumer-targeted phone, Nokia announced plans on Tuesday to acquire OZ Communications, a company that produces mobile messaging software in the same general ballpark as RIM and Motorola's Good Technology Group.

The buyout of Montreal, Canada-based OZ will allow users of Nokia's phones to gain quick access to Web-based e-mail and IM services such as Gmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL, and Windows Live Hotmail, officials of the Finnish-based phone maker said in a statement today.

Yet with Apple apparently eying a bigger share of the business space for iPhone, how much attention will Nokia continue to pay to its own established corporate customers? As previously reported in BetaNews, Nokia announced in mid-September that, on the enterprise side, S60 3rd Edition devices will now feature the Mail for Exchange mobile e-mail application.

Then in a seeming shift toward a more consumer-oriented direction, the company made a string of other announcements this week, including the creation of a new consumer e-mail service, the abandonment of its in-house enterprise software development, and an effort to sell its security appliances arm to an unnamed investor.

Nokia is also expected to roll out its first touchscreen-based phone -- dubbed "The Tube" -- at a media and analyst event in London on Thursday.

The OZ acquisition looks likely to bring some interesting new prospects to Nokia on the consumer front -- along with some potential complications -- due to pacts with a number of mobile service providers, handset makers, and software vendors already established by OZ.

OZ's current list of partners includes: AT&T, the provider of the iPhone's wireless services in the US; Sprint Nextel, a member of the Google-spearheaded Open Handset Alliance (OHA); Canada's Rogers Wireless; European-based Orange France Telecom; Apple's rival Microsoft; and Nokia competitors Motorola, Palm, SonyEricsson, Samsung, LG, and HTC, the last two of which are also OHA members.