Finns sleep with The Beast

DEEP SHOCK IS the only way of describing the feeling after being herded into a tent on the beach @ 3GSM Cannes by Nokia. Then revealed to. Good grief. Nokia appears to have got into bed with the Beast of Redmond not once but twice.

The first instance of co-operation between the two will be to put the Windows Media Player into Nokia's handsets. The objective here is to make it feasible to transfer music files created in a desktop format offered by WMA styles files and those in the mobile world which use DRM from the OMA and an AAC style file format.

If that wasn't bad enough, Mary McDowell (ex-HP etcetra), decided to prove her lineage. She announced that Nokia wil be supporting OTA (over-the-air) synchronisation with Microsoft's Exchange server. This apparently won't affect its relationships with other email vendors like Good, RIM, IBM and Smartner.

Our fellow journalists were also reeling from these revelations so one dared to ask if this meant Nokia intended to offer Windows Mobile based phones too.Nokia's Anssi Vanjoki nipped that one in the bud immediately by saying that Nokia had "no discussions of that nature" at all.

We suspect that Mary may have more tricks up her sleeve, though. µ

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