(April Fool's) CTIA: Cellular Competition Makes For Strange Bedfellows*

I’m not at the CTIA Wireless show, at least at the moment, but given the eye-popping news coming out of Las Vegas, maybe I’ll reconsider and jump on a plane for a daytrip. Check out these tasty tidbits:

• Nokia will follow in the footsteps of its Symbian partner and cellular competitor, Sony Ericsson, and release a Microsoft Windows Mobile v6.1-based variant of its Nseries phone family by year end. Someone in Finland (and Sweden) is worried about the looming iPhone threat, it seems…
• RIM, too, will be porting its BlackBerry hardware to the Windows Mobile operating system throughout the remainder of this year. The consistency and familiarity of the Windows Mobile GUI, along with guaranteed Exchange compatibility, seem to finally be paying dividends for Microsoft as it flexes its muscle versus alternative mobile O/Ss and application suites. One wonders, too, how much Microsoft’s recent acquisition of Danger factored in Nokia and RIM’s O/S shifts…
• Speaking of Microsoft and application suites, however, the company isn’t adverse to making an incremental buck (or few) whenever and wherever it can. It announced early this morning that it plans to port ActiveSync, the Exchange client, the Office Mobile suite and the Windows Live suite to run on both Apple’s iPhone OS X-based operating system (by virtue of the currently-beta SDK) and Google’s upcoming Android open-source O/S!

*Happy April Fools Day, by the way. Although that last bit about Microsoft porting its apps to non-Microsoft O/Ss…hey, who knows? The company develops Office and other apps for OS X, right?