Research in Motion, maker of the BlackBerry, has strengthened its push into the high street retail market with the launch of its first ever flip version of the handset as it seeks to find its place in the pocket of the average consumer.

RIM hopes the new BlackBerry Pearl Flip will follow the lead of previous forays into the high street, including the launch of a pink version edition and a Facebook application, which have helped the company almost double global sales of its handsets in the last year.

The BlackBerry-maker has not released details of the price but said it would be “very reasonable”. Analysts believed it could be the first BlackBerry available for pay-as-you-go customers.

It is available in the US on T-Mobile and is expected to roll-out in the UK later this year.

RIM is also expected to launch a touch device, called the BlackBerry Storm, later this year, taking on Apple’s iPhone.

Ben Wood, analyst at CCS Insight, said: “The Pearl Flip is definitely part of RIM’s strategy to get their proposition, which is wireless email on the move, into the hands of the consumer.

“We expect this is the product that could take the BlackBerry into prepay and that could take it into a whole new section of the market.”

Worldwide sales of BlackBerry's more than doubled in the second quarter this year to 5.6 million devices, from 2.47 million the year before, according to Gartner, the technology research company.

Jim Balsillie, co-chief executive of the Ontario-based group, said the clamshell model, launched today, was "extremely important" to winning more retail customers.

The original Pearl, launched almost exactly two years ago, was the turning point for RIM. Until then, BlackBerries had been much larger, incorporating a full QWERTY keyboard, and the clunky devices stayed primarily in the larger suit pockets of businessmen.

The slimline Pearl, about half the size of its predecessor, helped ease the handsets into women’s handbags and jeans pockets, boosting sales along the way. Non-enterprise customers - small and medium businesses and consumers - now make up 40 per cent of the company's 16 million subscribers, while in the three months to the end of May, 60 per cent of the 2.3 million subscribers added were from non-enterprise accounts.

RIM's expansion beyond the boardroom has put it in direct competition with rivals such as Apple, Nokia, Samsung and Motorola. T-Mobile is also expected to start selling a smartphone based on Google’s Android software soon.

Nokia is still the clear market leader, selling 15.27 million handsets in the last quarter, almost three times as many as RIM.

Yet BlackBerry is catching up with the Finnish handset maker, with sales growing 126 per cent between the second quarter in 2007 and this year, compared with 8 per cent growth for Nokia.

Nokia's dominance slipped from a 50.8 per cent market share in the second quarter last year to 47.5 per cent this year, while RIM's ramped up from 8.9 per cent to 17.4 per cent, reinforcing its second place in the rank.

The launch of the Pearl Flip coincided with Nokia's unveiling of a new application that will enable 80 million of their devices to connect to Microsoft's business email system, as the battle between smartphone makers intensifies.

All Nokia phones which use the S60 platform, developed by Symbian, will be able to download Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync allowing users to receive work email on their mobiles. The programme will be built in to Nokia's new E and N series phones, such as the N96, set to launch later this month.

Rivals including Palm and Motorola already have ActiveSync available on their smartphones.

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