Battling rivals whose wares increasingly act like BlackBerries, Research In Motion Ltd. (RIM) says it plans to release software that puts genuine BlackBerry features onto devices running Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Mobile 6 operating system. Slated to hit the street later this year, the suite will extend BlackBerry email, phone and PIM functions to "select" products, but RIM didn't detail which models. The news follows software releases from Microsoft, Palm Inc. and third-party providers that give BlackBerry contenders such as Palm's Treo smartphone the same "push" email technology that made RIM's device so popular. Over the past few months RIM has unveiled software linking its back-end message-handling technology to handsets from other manufacturers.

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