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Nokia smartphones haven't exactly set the U.S. market on fire. The same holds true for the operating system their built on, Symbian. This makes sense, considering the two are intimately linked, with the world's largest phone company shipping more handsets running the best-selling smartphone platform than any other vendor by a country mile.

The E62 is a far more attractive competitor to Research In Motion's (RIM) BlackBerry, Palm, Inc.'s Treo and Motorola's Q than much larger and bulkier business-orientated Nokia models with keyboards of the past, like the 9500 and 9300, which barely made a dent here. The smaller of the these two, the 9300, only became widely available in the U.S. this past spring, after first being introduced way back in September 2004.

A Less Pricey Smartphone?
There are even reports the E62 could cost less - as low as $99 with a contract - than the $199 Q, itself the most modestly priced of the communicators listed above, when Cingular Wireless (and possibly T-Mobile) start carrying as soon as next month.

Earlier this summer there were predictions that the subsidized cost of the Q could drop to an incredibly low $50 by the end of the year. So there's a chance the Q will more than keep up with the E62 on the sticker front if rumors are correct. And it looks like a smartphone price war may be a brewing, which can only help consumers in the end.

We wouldn’t be surprised if carriers find a way to make up for ‘cheaper’ communicators through their data plans, however. Then again, it has long been shown that smartphone owners are among the operator customers with the highest average revenue per user (ARPU). In other words, they use content services the most often.

Not the Fastest Family Member
Nokia has been shipping a sister smartphone to the E62, the E61, in Europe and Asia for a few months now. Those familiar with that device will be unhappy to hear that the U.S. version will be missing Wi-Fi and high-speed UMTS cellular-broadband technology, which'll surely put a crimp in any hopes for blazing fast downloads and Web surfing.

The Symbian 9.1, S60 3rd Edition and quad-band (850/900/1800/1900) GSM/GPRS smartphone does support the less speedy but far more widely available EDGE network data standard. So all is not lost.

Cingular has been rolling out an advanced HSDPA 3G network - a evolution of Europe's more common UMTS standard, however. And it is backwards compatible, so Nokia could have conceivably implemented the UMTS technology into the E62. Where HSDPA isn’t available users would have fallen back on Cingular's EDGE data network.

As for T-Mobile, it is so far behind in its 3G deployment, it isn't a factor at this time.

Nixing Wi-Fi is more questionable. Often carriers don't like the technology because they worry users won't be tied to them all the time to access content services from their cellular-data plans. So that could have been an operator decision and not Nokia's.

Features, E-Mail, Apps
The E62 also has a four-way joystick, 235 MHz processor, wide 2.8-inch 320 x 240-pixel resolution & 16 million color screen, 90 MB of internal memory, Bluetooth, miniSD slot for up to 2GB of extra memory and USB connectivity.

It weighs around 5 ounces and measures 4.61 x 2.76 x 0.63 inches; slightly larger than a Q, but smaller than a Treo.

The QWERTY thumb-keyboard appears to be a little different than the E61's, adding a My Own button; a user-configurable shortcut key found in Series 80 smartphones like the Nokia 9500 and 9300. There's also no Pop-Port.

Found in many higher-end Nokia phones, a Pop-Port is a non-standard interface that incorporates several functions. Rather, the E62 offers both a mini USB port and 2.5 millimeter headset jack.

The smartphone supports a number of different wireless e-mail options, including Intellisync, Good's GoodLink, DataViz's RoadSync for Microsoft Exchange servers and push e-mail, Consilient, Cingular's XpressMail (Visto), and - most eye-opening of all - BlackBerry Connect, a service that delivers RIM's personal or enterprise e-mail and data access to devices other than BlackBerrys.

So IT managers get another smartphone to choose from for delivering mobile messaging and applications to users through the BlackBerry Enterprise Server.

Full attachment handling (documents, spreadsheets, presentations, PDF viewer and ZIP manager) and an editing function (document, spreadsheet and presentation) are also included.

As a S60 3rd edition smartphone, the E62 features Nokia's newest Web browser, which impressed when we got to see it at CTIA last spring. In addition to superior page rendering and numerous other features, the browser lets you see what a Web page would look like on a desktop. SmartPhoneToday will cover this browser in detail, as well as several others, in a review roundup later this month.

We'll let you know more about the E62 as it gets closer to launch. We also expect to get one for review about that time.