I was being a little flip the other day in talking about how R.I.M. had "gone international" by linking with Nokia.

It goes further than that. (The picture is from the New York Times.

The new Blackberry device looks like nothing so much as...a Nokia mobile phone.

And it works like one, too.

The "innovations" in the design of the new Blackberry 7100t (even sounds like a Nokia name) involve the design of the keypad. There are 25 keys in all (that's new) including a top row of function keys. But the keys are designed so they can be touched on different sides to deliver different commands.

This is something Nokia users have been playing with for years. It's part of my old Nokia 3595. And it's in other Nokia phones.

Most Symbian phone companies rely on a central "Navigation Key" which can be pressed in four directions, or downward, delivering different results depending on the menu instructions on the phone screen. Nokia long-ago took this one step further, applying the same idea to all its keys, in order to reduce their number. All R.I.M. has done is apply this to the alphabet. Beyond that, a look at the tiny screen shows all the old Blackberry applications as icons.

The idea here is that you can now use the Blackberry with one hand. But that's just one idea. The other idea is you can now get a Blackberry for about the cost of any other mobile phone. And that idea, too, came from Nokia.

It's a Nokiaberry. Time will tell whether this is the start of something big or, perhaps, just R.I.M.'s big Finnish.