Well there has been no announcement about the 7650i. I'm not surprised as I dont think Nokia would want to announce an upgrade so soon after launching the original model. However I was half expecting a North American (NA) version of the 7650 wheather it be triband or not.
As the 7650 has been succesful in EMEA why would they not want to launch it in North America? It could be because they are behind us with MMS but how many people currently use that here? You can still send pictures via E-Mail, which is pretty good interim solution and the device holds up well on its own.
Nokia just seems to have a reluctance to release and promote Symbian based products in North America. I don't even think the 9290 was strongly promoted and is only available from Nokia themselves and not on the highstreet. The question is why?
I go around and ask the same question sometimes. Nokia, a leading phone company, would'nt break a sweat if it added tri-band to a device, as it already has tri-band devices. But it's kinda confusing, alotta people have 7650's here in the middle east, and there's no GPRS or MMS, well atleast in most of the countries. (excluding UAE)
I think we should ask nokia 😃
The whole mobile industry in US seems to be years behind rest of the world. Since operators don't have the services available and customers don't seem to know that they even exist, it's quite pointless to try and bring a phone that has all these neat little features that cannot be used.
Mind you, this is just my opinion. I've spent 2 short (~3 week) spells in US during the last year and the people I met there weren't actually living the mobile revolution. :cry:
** Magic **
I know the USA is behind (I'm not even sure if they can SMS between networks?) but they do have GPRS they could access the internet and send emails. They could still use the PDA functionality and download extra software. It still has the potential to be a very popular device over there and hopefully encourage the mobile phone market to catch up with the rest of us 😊