See:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/09...to_ship_early/

The question is, will it have BBConnect on it?!

I doubt it very seriously considering they are marketing it as the Blackberry beater

Motorola has released bbConnect on their MPx220, I wouldn't expect bbConnect available at product launch, but I have read articles where they say they will support BlackBerry as well as GoodLink and Exchange Mobile Messaging and Security pack.

To be a "blackberry beater" it would have to do push email well, have a qwerty keyboard, be reliable, consistant, and most likely work natively with corporate email systems (MS Exchange Server and Lotus Domino).

I don't see most of those requirements being met.

It has WM 5.0 (so can use push mail from Microsoft Exchange 2003 SP2), it has a QWERTY keyboard, no comment on reliable / consistant yet as it isn't available to test at the moment.

Interesting regarding pushing email from MS Exchange 2003 SP2. I know with us being a Lotus Notes shop, if would actually be nice to still have a MS Exchange server around. I know a lot of our back end stuff can be made to work better with Exchange (for alerts and mail integration) and with Domino unfortunately (our ERP and CRM packages for example) than with Domino. And if we could leverage that instead of something like a BES server, and support a wider variety of PDAs, then all the better. We could leverage exchange to work as glue between Domino and some of the newer stuff.

We'd be a few years off from dumping Domino completely. MS hasn't replaced all of the functionality of Notes and Domino with its various tools. Although Exchange + IIS (threaded discussions) + SQL + Sharepoint + Outlook + IE gets you darn close.

WM2005 does not support push e-mail from Exchange SP2... there is a software update for the devices that will be available as well.

It will only be compatible with WM2005+ from what I understand.

Yes, you need the: Messaging & Security Feature Pack for Windows Mobile 5.0 update:

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobi...5/default.mspx

That's smart.

The more messaging support their devices have (Exchange, BlackBerry, GoodLink), the more devices they'll sell.

i'm curious how much, if anything, the security feature pack will end up being... if they give it away for free, i'd be VERY surprised. it appears they are giving the update to the OEMs/vendors, so i supposed MSFT won't seem like the 'bad guy' when there is an upgrade fee involved for the added functionality...