Orange followed in the footsteps of Zain to launch Blackberry solutions in Kenya. Telkom Kenya and Research In Motion announced the launch of Blackberry and the expected roll out on the commercial brand Orange.? Through Blackberry solutions, clients will be able to access email, web, multimedia and other applications.

Orange will be offering subscribers Blackberry Bold Smartphone , on top of Blackberry Enterprise Server. ??Blackberry ?Bold Smartphone supports ?tri-band HSDPA high speed networks around the world and comes with integrated GPS and Wi-Fi (802.11a/b/g). Other features include a 2-megapixel camera with LED flash, Bluetooth.

On the clients? subscriptions front, Orange seems to be doing very well. The company netted 1.38 million mobile customers in its first year in operation under the ?Orange? banner, and expects the number to rise to over two million by the end of 2009.

The Telkom Kenya CEO Mickael Ghossain said they are focusing their investment on the higher value services, such as W-CDMA and the broadband networks. Well he claimed that Kenyan customers have little interest in price wars between service providers, but instead are concern about quality of service. ?I am not sure whether that is entirely true. May be that can be backed up with the fact that most people in Kenya has ?remained with high expensive service providers instead of subscribing to the new but very affordable networks. At the end I think people care about the prices as well as the quality of the service.