Good news today for Symbian from Nokia which today announced the Nokia 3650, a feature-rich handset built with a integrated digital camera, and powered by the operating system.

In essence, The 3650 develops Nokia's imaging phone story beyond the 7650, launched earlier this year in Europe and Asia Pac. The handset is pitched at business and consumer markets. It's tri-band, so works across most of the world for the road warrior, who can access a "wide range of business applications, such as corporate e-mail access, calendar, to-do lists and contact applications". And there's Bluetooth support.

And for the early adopting consumers? The Nokia 3650 is an "imaging handset in Nokia's high-volume "Expression" category, designed to appeal to a mass-market audience of those who are free-spirited, expressive and young-at-heart". Mass market is why it's good news for Symbian (and by extension Psion, which this week said it needs to see 15-20m Symbian handset sales a year, before it makes a profit from its share in the business).

Nokia's free spirits can use the phone to send mobile games, multimedia messaging (MMS) and video clips (the phone has software for playback and recording).

According to the firm,the handset "clearly marks the beginning of a new era for the Series 60", the firm's software reference design platform which sits on top of the Symbian OS and which competes against Stinger, Microsoft's smartphone platform. Samsung, Siemens and Matsushita are Series 60 licensees.

The 3650 launches in early 2003. Nokia today also launched the 3510i, a colour phone for the youth market.

You can see what the 3650 looks like here.

And you can get the rest of the spec here.

And you can read why some early adopters of the 7650 are feeling a little short-changed here. (Basic gripe, the 3650 is a better, almost certainly cheaper phone. They want an upgrade path.)

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