Lotus Adds Applications For BlackBerry, Android Smartphones

Lotus is expanding the range of software the company offers for smartphones, unveiling at Lotusphere Monday a deeper relationship with BlackBerry maker Research in Motion and disclosing plans to develop a version of its Lotus Notes Traveler software for the Android operating system.

Throughout keynote speeches and product roadmap briefings at the conference, Lotus executives have made it clear that supporting a range of smartphones is a company priority. Alistair Rennie, the new Lotus general manager, said in a press conference Monday that it was hard to miss the discussion about how mobile computing is quickly becoming "a fundamental way people will work."

IBM and RIM unveiled new social networking applications for BlackBerry smartphones, including a new BlackBerry Client for IBM Lotus Quickr and a new version of the BlackBerry Client for IBM Lotus Connections. The companies said the applications would be available from IBM.

Quickr is IBM Lotus' team collaboration and document-sharing application. Connections is the vendor's social networking software.

Lotus is also developing a version of its Lotus Notes Traveler, the company's mobile e-mail application, for smartphones that use Google's Android operating system. That product will be ready by the middle of this year, said Kevin Cavanaugh, vice president of messaging and collaboration.

Lotus also now offers an encrypted mail plug-in for Apple's popular iPhone, Cavanaugh said.