Would You Pay $700 For a Cutting-Edge Phone?

Yesterday, Nokia unveiled a bunch of new phones, many of which, surprise-surprise, won't make it to the U.S. market. Case in point: the N95, a five-megapixel camera-and-music-phone with built-in GPS and a patented dual slide (slide it to the right and you get the keypad, slide it to the left and you get the media-player controls). Think of it as the just-released N93, the next generation, though if the N95 ever makes it to the U.S. (it's slated for early 2007 release in Europe), it may be in a slightly-altered form.

I'm also severely bummed that the Mondrian-esque, two-toned "Xpress Music" editions of the 3250 (pictured, below) and 5300 are only slated for the European market. That said, the person demo-ing the 3250 for me said that the phone, a huge seller abroad in its standard version, would be making it stateside by year's end. We'll see. For now, it looks like I'll have to browse the virtual aisles of unlocked-phone sellers such as eBay or Dynamism.com for this one.

Two phones that will definitely be available in North America include the N75 (pictured, below), which is a multimedia-optimized, N-series phone in clamshell form. The soap-sized N75 can hold up to 2 gigabytes of  music-, image-, or video-files and has 3-D stereo speakers, but otherwise looks just like any other clamshell with play, advance, and pause controls on the front. Nokia says it's talking with U.S. carriers about offering this phone, which would push down the price. The phone runs on GSM and EDGE networks, so either Cingular or T-Mobile would carry it.

Much cooler is the N73 Music Edition (pictured, top)—essentially a black version of the recently-released N73 with up to 2 gigabytes of memory (using a miniSD card), a dedicated music button, and seamless integration with music software. I love the cool media player interface, which is controlled using an intuitive mini-joystick (to maneuver through playlists and the various control buttons). Nokia says the phone is compatible with files protected under digital rights management. I could not confirm if the N73 Music Edition would work only work with tracks purchased off of sites such as Napster, Yahoo! Music Unlimited, and Rhapsody, or if it will also work with subscription tracks. My guess is it will only work with purchased tracks. As we all know, the phone will not play songs purchased off of iTunes unless you burn them onto a CD and re-rip them. Another cool feature: Slide open the lens cover and the phone automatically goes to the 3.2 megapixel camera's LCD viewfinder, which makes it a cinch to take on-the-fly snapshots and upload them to photo sharing sites such as Flickr—directly from the phone.

So hats-off to more phones that do more than ever from Nokia, but what does this mean to most of us? Yes, you can purchase and operate these bleeding-edge handsets-cum-mediacorders-cum-computers in North America, but since so far most U.S. carriers don't carry them directly, expect to pay a pretty penny for the privilege of owning one (around $500-$800 for one of these babies when they go on sale at Nokia's website later this year). The good news is that Nokia makes it easy to configure its unlocked phones to work with U.S. carriers (just go to the Nokia website and have a text message sent to your phone with the correct settings for using the T-Mobile and Cingular on-deck data functions).

Still, do you think it's worth paying $500 or more for unlocked, cutting-edge phones?

Disclosure: Yahoo! Music Unlimited and Flickr are online services owned and offered by Yahoo!, Inc., which also owns and operates Yahoo! Tech.