Motorola to offer alternative handset

Dubai: A mobile phone manufacturer with offices in Dubai is bracing for the migration of BlackBerry users should an October 11 ban on BlackBerry-encrypted email and web-browsing services take effect in the UAE.

Raed Hafez, Motorola's Product Director for International Markets based in Dubai, said his firm's new mobile phone dubbed Milestone is equipped with encryption software to keep highly confidential business data safe from hackers.

The new phone, released in March, "has all the messaging support you need," said Hafez in an interview Wednesday with Gulf News.

Motorola, it would appear, has learnt a lesson from RIM which sold its BlackBerry with pre-installed Messenger services that, with the flip of a switch, enabled phone users to instantly talk, text and chat confidentially over one of the most secure telecom systems on the world.

The leading-edge technology propelled RIM in its 2010 first quarter to a 24 per cent spike in revenues to $4.24 billion (Dh15 billion) over the same period last year, RIM records show.

Earlier this year, RIM said it "shipped its 100 millionth BlackBerry smartphone during the quarter."

Electronic tunnel

With its new Milestone phone, Motorola has also pre-installed four configurations of what is called VPN for short — Virtual Private Network software — that creates an encrypted point-to-point electronic tunnel to send sensitive data.

"VPN allows you to have a secure connection between you and your enterprise server directly," Hafez said.

The big difference, however, is that Motorola's encrypted VPN software opens a tunnel between user and a corporate server negating the need to export data outside of the country.

Part of the concerns held by Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) about BlackBerry Messenger is that encrypted BBM data was exported offshore and couldn't be monitored.

"There is no reason to go offshore," said Hafez. "Most companies have servers in this country. It [secured data] doesn't have to go offshore to get there."

And, unlike the BBM software which is proprietary and known only to RIM, the VPN software used by Motorola's Milestone phone is a software known to world telcom regulators.

"It's not an obscure interface, it's a known interface to regulatory bodies," he said. "It's an approved standard and is accepted globally."

Hafez said he didn't know if the VPN software used by Motorola can be monitored by TRA officials in the UAE but said, "It's shared, everyone knows how it works."