Nokia's New Business Phones Come Late to the Game

Nokia today announced two new phones aimed at business users, the E66, and the E71. The new E71 looks to be more like a Blackberry competitor than does the E66, which is a slider phone. The E71 for example is a phone with a full-time accessible keyboard much like a Blackberry.

The two new phones bring Nokia forward to present time, as it’s been quite a while since the company introduced something modern for the business world. Unfortunately, Nokia may be a bit late in the game. At the present time, RIM dominates the enterprise arena with its Blackberry phones and Apple is catching up quite fast with the iPhone. The new iPhone 2.0 firmware for example, tackles many areas of concern for business users — Exchange syncing, push email, push calender, and other wireless syncing options included with its .Mac replacement, MobileMe.

"The business market is becoming increasingly competitive and highly segmented so these new products are critical new additions to Nokia’s E series line up," said Geoff Blaber, an analyst at research firm CCS.

Nokia says that the two new phones will be available around July for roughly $530 USD. Both phones will supposedly have "enterprise features" and support for true GPS navigation features, something that is now available with Apple’s iPhone 3G.