So, Wi-Fi has come to the Blackberry. Eh, so what! They were cool devices say, a few years back. But with today’s mobile options out there, I am just not all that convinced that adding Wi-Fi to the blackberry is going to do diddly in helping to ‘revive’ the love people once had for these devices.

RIM has finally released its first Wi-Fi Blackberry - something it has been working on at for at least a year.

The eagerly awaited product has already been signed up by Nortel and 3Com, with both offering systems that tie the new BlackBerry 7270 into company voice and wireless networks.

“Once users have adopted collaboration tools, the extension to the mobile arena will happen very quickly,” said Paul Templeton, vice president of enterprise solutions at Nortel, which is adding the BlackBerry to an existing system that uses SIP to deliver email and corporate instant messaging to desktops.

The 7270, announced in October, is the first BlackBerry with no cellphone radio, and intended for “campus warriors” who roam a site but need access to email and other communications services.

Both Nortel and 3Com will put a SIP client on the device, and sell it to business users, alongside voice-only Wi-Fi handsets from Spectralink. “First generation Wi-Fi phones haven’t been terribly good, because of their battery life,” said Mike Valiant, market development director for enterprise voice at 3Com. “This is the first in a portfolio of other Wi-Fi devices: it’s good enough to put alongside the Spectralink devices.”

The two companies are selling the 7270 as a device that offers instant messaging, e-mail and telephony in one handy unit, but offering it to people lower down the executive chain, who aren’t so mobile, and can’t run up the high mobile bill of a typical BlackBerry user.