RIM's BlackBerry mobile email devices are facing formidable opponents as Motorola, Nokia and Palm beef up competing offerings, analyst firm IDC predicts in a new study. 

"The timing is right for a more powerful attack against BlackBerry as competitive forces converge," said Sean Ryan, research analyst for mobile markets at IDC.

"Nokia is offering an end-to-end solution of its own, while Motorola and Palm, among others, are leveraging Microsoft's Windows Mobile 5.0 and Microsoft Exchange."

RIM currently dominates the mobile email market with 5.5 million subscribers worldwide, according to company estimates.

But IDC believes that the overall market still is far from exhausted, predicting shipments of mobile email devices to reach 63 million by 2010, up from 7.3 million in 2005.

Nokia and Motorola are in a good position to take over RIM's lead, IDC claimed, because they are the largest and second largest maker of mobile phones worldwide.

Both vendors have introduced well received business smartphones this year with the Motorola Q and Nokia E61.

IDC also suggested that enterprises will be attracted to devices that run Windows Mobile and work with Microsoft Exchange, such as the Motorola Q and Palm's Treo.

The analyst firm predicted that Windows devices will claim 32.3 per cent of the market by 2010.

BlackBerry devices run on proprietary software and require enterprises to run the BlackBerry Enterprise Server to provide access to email.