Nokia announced four new phones this week at Capital Market Days at Amsterdam, held annually. The Nokia 6300, Nokia 6290 and the Nokia 6086 — as well as the Nokia 2626 targeted to consumers in entry markets. All four models are expected to begin shipping in the first quarter of 2007.

The Sony Ericsson W810 is a fairly minor upgrade, featuring an improved keypad layout for playing back multimedia, and it’s now a quad band GSM handset, rather than tri-band. Sony Ericsson have also added EDGE high speed data, allowing quicker access to the internet for those who have a compatible carrier – and the W810 also supports over-the-air music downloads, so EDGE will be a real advantage for those who have it.

The M240 / X7 is very similar to the Samsung E800. The similarities are more than skin deep though, the weight, screen size and feature set are almost identical to the E800, plus the camera is hidden by the sliding mechanism when closed, in a similar way to the Samsung. The major difference is that the O2 X7 / Grundig M240 comes with a 1.3 megapixel camera and the Grundig is a little smaller and lighter all around than the Samsung.

The Fujitsu Siemens Pocket Loox T810 is an advanced 3G phone running Windows Mobile 5.0, complete with WiFi and GPS navigation. The T830 model adds a 2.0 megapixel main camera plus VGA sub camera. It also features a QWERTY keyboard and a large 2.4″ 240×240 pixel transflective touch-sensitive display.

The Sagem my600X or to give it the absolutely correct capitalisation, the SAGEM my600X (SAGEM is an acronym for Société d’Applications Générales de l’Electricité et de la Mécanique), their latest offering and one of a very small number of 3G devices from Sagem.

However, during 2006 Sagem have rebuilt their mobile phone portfolio with a wide range of cosmetically similar devices that are quite competitive and certainly nicer to look at than some Sagems of old.

The Nokia 6288 is a revised version of the 6280, although it’s very difficult to see what has changed between the two models apart from a few cosmetic differences. As with the previous handset, the Nokia 6288 is a 3G slider with a 2 megapixel main camera, VGA subcamera, 240×320 pixel display, Bluetooth, multimedia support and microSD expandable memory. The main difference appears to be that the Nokia 6282 is bundled with a 512Mb memory card, compared to 64Mb on the old version.

The Nokia 770 has always been an oddity in Nokia’s line-up as it lacks a phone or GPRS or 3G data, instead relying on WiFi or a Bluetooth connection to another handset. And early devices had teething problems, as discussed in our review. But as it runs Linux, the open source community have been very busy porting applications to Nokia’s Maemo platform, which we understand has led to the development of other similar devices during 2006.

The Sony Ericsson M600i is a 3G phone with tri-band GSM (900/1800/1900), expandable memory (using Memory Stick Micro cards), plus a full range of applications including the Opera web browser, an email client, and multimedia player. Plus the M600i comes with a jog-dial control in addition to the touchscreen, as does the larger P900 series.