Not yet 3G but Nokia comes back with sexy devices

Nokia has presented its annual avalanche of new products, with an emphasis on new form factors in handsets, push-to-talk technology and being truly on the eve of a number of 3G network roll outs.

The star of this year’s Nokia Mobile Internet Conference (NMIC) has so far been the 7700 device. Looking like a small tablet, it features a very high quality touch screen and a focus on what the company is dubbing ‘living in the media’.

However, behind the screen it is a tri-band device that will also work on Edge networks and features access to radio and TV content, using DVB-H. Most interesting from a technical standpoint is that it marks the launch of Series 90 software on top of the Symbian operating system.

Nokia’s Series 60 software remains its main smart phone platform and Series 40 its most common, on hundreds of millions of devices. Series 90 will be an evolution from Series 80, seen on the brick-like Communicator for some time, and allows full web access, employing the Opera browser.

Also eye-catching has been the fashion-conscious 7200 handset, which, unusually for Nokia, sports a clamshell design. Anssi Vanjoki, executive VP Nokia Mobile Phones, called it the Finnish vendor’s first “style-fold” design, adding: “It has an emotional appeal.”

The last year has generally seen commentators agree other handset makers have stolen a march on Nokia in design, with Samsung, Siemens and even Sony Ericsson producing sexier models, although Nokia’s ease-of-use has rarely been questioned,

But despite the gadgets on show, it is arguably behind the scenes, in the area of networks, that most progress has been made. Nokia notes around 60 operators are now building out Edge technology – sometimes referred to as 2.75G as it sits between 2.5G GPRS and full 3G – though how or even if it is used alongside the W-CDMA flavour of 3G favoured by most is yet to be known.

Jarmo Leivo, director of W-CDMA RAN marketing at Nokia’s IP Mobility Networks unit, told silicon.com Edge will likely be used to complement areas which won’t initially be reached by 3G.

However he promised 95 per cent of operators with 3G licences are still moving to the technology and 25 are “rolling out heavily”. In addition to well-known operators, such as Hutchison 3 networks around the world, he said there will be 15 W-CDMA 3G networks by the end of this year and 50 by the end of next.

Both Orange and Vodafone – who between them operate several dozen networks – have both publicly pinned their hopes to volume launches in the second half of next year. However, Leivo’s figures do not take into account 3G launches of the CDMA2000 flavour. Although Nokia sells second-generation CDMA handsets it will have no CDMA2000 network infrastructure business. Having already shipped around 27,000 W-CDMA base stations, Nokia said it is the market leader with more than 30 per cent share, though it wouldn’t say how much it has made from the sales.

Besides Edge and W-CDMA, the other big network story is push-to-talk (PTT) technology. A big hit in certain vertical markets in the US – mainly via Nextel – PTT allows walkie-talkie one-to-many or one-to-one communications and even voicemail exchanges that some have even said will challenge SMS text messaging.

Nokia’s Vanjoki very much pinned his company’s colours to the technology. He said: “[We] see it as standard on all Nokia handsets in the future. We’re moving our souls into the network.”

Of the phones unveiled today, only the 7700 can be upgraded to manage PTT, mainly because it uses the Symbian OS.

The other models announced were: the 6820 (from a full price of €320) and 6810 (€250), both upgrades to last year’s 6800 and featuring a ‘flip-out’ full Qwerty keyboard; the compact and feature-rich 6230 (€400) and the 610 Car Kit Phone (€350).

The 7700 and “style statement” 7200 won’t be available for a number of months but already have tags of at least €500 and €450 next to them.