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Hot on the heels of Rogers Wireless unveiling of Nokia's E62 smartphone up north last week, Cingular Wireless today announced it would ship the Finnish phone-maker’s bid for BlackBerry/Q/Treo territory on September 29th in this country.

Nokia may be the best-selling smartphone vendor in the world, but its advanced handsets in this country haven't done very well. The E62 aims to change that by mirroring the form-factor and capabilities of high-profile communicators that American's like. It is ultra-thin and compact like Motorola's Q, includes a QWERTY thumb-keyboard for easy text entry, and offers a number of different mobile e-mail options.

Cingluar President business markets Kent Mathy said, "Nokia has built a rock-solid device with an ultra-thin, modern form factor, support for several popular business and personal wireless email platforms, a great Web browsing experience and unsurpassed Nokia voice quality - all at a great price."

In fact, the edition of the E62 available from Cingular supports a wider swath of push-mail solutions than Roger is offering, which is the MyMail (Visto run) option. Cingular customers get to choose from Good Mobile Messaging, Cingular Xpress Mail (SEVEN-based), BlackBerry Connect, Mail for Exchange, the Nokia push solution via Intellisync Mobile Suite, and standard clients such as POP3, IMAP and SMTP.

(By the way, SEVEN is the white-labeled mobile e-mail provider for Xpress Mail to Cingular's Palm Treos, Windows Mobile devices and other Symbian smartphones as well. It currently provides mob-e-mail solutions to over 100 operators worldwide and controls about 65 percent of the white label market.)

“Cingular believes that the Nokia E62 will help drive much broader adoption of wireless e-mail across both business and consumer users," added Cingular spokesperson John Kampfe to PDAStreet. "The combination of a sleek form factor, wide choice of business and personal wireless e-mail platforms, exceptional battery life and broad nationwide and international coverage at a very compelling price is a powerful one that will drive wireless e-mail usage down through the ranks in companies as well as into the hands of consumers who until now have waited patiently on the outside of the wireless e-mail arena looking in.”

The device includes an instant messaging application and the ability to view, edit and create documents, spreadsheets and presentations. There's also a built-in MP3 player, video player and software to view images. It lacks a camera, however.

Nokia has been shipping a sister smartphone to the E62, the E61, in Europe and Asia for the past several months. The main difference between the two is that the E61 includes Wi-Fi and high-speed UMTS cellular-broadband technology, and the E62 does not.

Otherwise, the E62 is basically the same Symbian 9.1, S60 3rd Edition and quad-band (850/900/1800/1900) GSM/GPRS international smartphone that does support the less speedy but far more widely available EDGE network data standard, however. Cingular says its EDGE network is available in 13,000 cities and towns and along some 40,000 miles of major highways.

The E62 also has a four-way joystick, 235 MHz processor, wide 2.8-inch 320 x 240-pixel resolution and 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, which is a user-configurable shortcut key, and there's both a mini USB port and 2.5 millimeter headset jack. There's also a speakerphone, voice dialing, voice commands for menu shortcuts, six-way conference calling, and a dedicated voice key for voice recording.

It features Nokia's newest Web browser, which promises superior page rendering, zooming and narrow page layouts for a PC-like viewing experience.

Nokia specs out the battery for the device for about hours talk time.

Cingular says the E62 will go for as little as $149.99 with a two-year service contract, which is $50 less than what Verizon is asking for the Q, half as much as Cingular is asking for its keyboard-based 8700 RIM BlackBerry model, and anywhere from $50 to $300 dollars lower than the various permutations of the Treo.

"Nokia E62 delivers on the promises of the entire range of Nokia Eseries devices," according to Nokia Enterprise Solutions executive VP Mary McDowell. "We are very excited about the opportunity to provide this offering to the U.S. market with Cingular and truly take mobile e-mail to the masses."