T-Mobile Gets Exclusive Rights To Nokia 6650

T-Mobile International will be the sole carrier to offer the Nokia 6650 smartphone starting sometime in the third quarter, the carrier and vendor said jointly on Monday at the CeBIT tradeshow in Hanover, Germany.

Retail pricing for the new units wasn't discussed, but T-Mobile is expected to offer the Nokia 6650 for 1 euro to customers who sign up for its Relax 100 rate. The plan tracks with other carriers' recent moves to get new smartphones into the hands of multimedia consumers willing to pay the premiums associated with advanced services.

Nokia has equipped the bifold handset with an assisted GPS (A-GPS) capability and multimedia player functions so that customers can access T-Mobile services such as Web'n'walk, MyFaves, Mobile Jukebox, and NaviGate.

A-GPS, developed in part to handle the FCC's E911 mandates for mobile networks, provides more reliable location information than conventional GPS, when mobile signals might be weakened from being indoors or beneath thick foliage, for example.

The 6650 also has an interface for High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA), which at present, offers 1.4-Mbps downloads, with a theoretical upper limit of 7.2 Mbps HSDPA, coupled with a 2.2 square-inch display and its 16 million colors, is expected to boost Web browsing video playback on the handset.

T-Mobile is also touting the 6650's 2-megapixel camera with flash, 30 MB of internal memory, a MicroSD card slot, FM radio, and Bluetooth connectivity.

The feature-rich handset is also testimony to how mobile users expect an experience comparable to what they get in fixed environments, whether for Web browsing, sending and receiving e-mail, or making video a more ordinary part of their media consumption. The biggest obstacles here have been better browsers for mobile units and more flexibility to run mobile operating systems on other vendors' phones.