Yahoo Inc. and Sprint Corp. have launched a new service that delivers inexpensive access to mobile e-mail, signalling that data on-the-go is becoming a mass-market offering and no longer just an exclusive communications tool for businesses and governments.
Together with a software company called Seven Networks Inc., the partners Wednesday began selling mobile access to Yahoo's free web-based e-mail for $2.99 (U.S.) a month, plus air time.
In comparison, phone companies charge at least $40 a month to subscribers of Research In Motion Ltd.'s BlackBerry service.
While RIM remains the most profitable and popular mobile data service among business users, reporting about three million subscribers around the globe, RIM's competitors and its carrier partners have begun seeding the mass market with similar offerings.
“What you're getting is a BlackBerry-like experience at $2.99 a month,” Bill Nguyen founder, chairman and co-chief executive officer of Seven, said in an interview.
“We really believe this is a mass-market play.”
The service, called Yahoo Mail for Mobile, will initially run on only devices made by Sanyo, Samsung and PalmOne and be available only in the United States.
E-mail has been accessible through Web connections on mobile devices for some time, but these services are slow and cumbersome.
Yahoo and Sprint are building on an existing relationship, and with the help of Seven's software they are promising customers fast and easy access to their Yahoo e-mail accounts, including the ability to retrieve new messages almost instantaneously, to access their Yahoo address book and to synchronize changes between their accounts and their handheld devices.
The service is good enough to challenge RIM and will begin commoditizing the market that the Waterloo, Ont.-based company pioneered in 1999, said Richard Doherty, president of Envisioneering Group, a technology consulting company in Seaford, N.Y.
“With an estimated 60 million unique monthly users of Yahoo Mail, we believe this application should significantly increase mass-market adoption of mobile e-mail,” Michael Walkley and Amit Kapur, research analysts at Piper Jaffray Co., said in a note Wednesday.
The short-term impact on RIM will be limited, but “white-label” offerings from Seven, Visto Inc. and Good Technology Inc. (which phone companies can re-brand as their own) could begin putting pressure on RIM's selling prices over the next year or two, they wrote.
Through a New York-based spokeswoman, RIM declined to comment on how the changing landscape will affect its BlackBerry business.
For Yahoo, the move continues the game of one-upmanship with Google Inc., as the two Web search companies compete to attract more visitors to their Internet portals.
Google, which is in the late testing stages of its web-based e-mail service, first raised the stakes by offering a massive two gigabytes of free storage.
Yahoo responded to Google's move by raising its capacity this year and has also recently added mobile photos and mobile games to its services.
