Nokia licenses Exchange ActiveSync and Windows Media

Now this is a surprise, and a pleasant one. Nokia announced that they’re licensing Exchange ActiveSync for their Series 60 and Series 80-based phones. This is excellent news for the Exchange team; clearly their effort to get EAS more widely deployed is bearing fruit. (Nokia also licensed Flash.. just what I want on my phone, not.) Interestingly, the WIndows Mobile team has been busy at 3GSM World too; they announced that Flextronics, a large original device manufacturer (ODM), will be building “Peabody”, a new, lower-cost, reference platform for Windows Mobile devices. It should be interesting to see how this plays out.

Update: it turns out that Nokia is also licensing a bunch of Windows Media technologies, including Windows Media DRM and the Media Transfer Protocol. Take that, Apple and your not-yet-shipping Motorola iTunes phone!