Nokia’s Lumia 710 landed — Taiwan, then Russia, India, H-K, world

Taiwanese Nokia fans will be the first to get their hands on the Lumia 710, the surprisingly agile Windows Phone and digital brother to the Lumia 800. The Lumia 710 is priced at US$322 and ships to Singapore, Hong Kong, India and Russia over the coming week, then globally in early 2012.

Why should you care about the Lumia 710? As Nokia puts it, the Lumia 710 is an “affordable Windows Phone experience,” based on the surprisingly awesome Windows Phone 7.5 Mango build. It uses a unique design which distances itself from the N9 build of the Lumia 800.

It’s a great starter smartphone, with a 3.7 inch screen, swappable covers, the standard (but ever powerful) 5MP camera with LED flash and 8GB of storage. Bizarrely, there is no option to upgrade storage with an SD card.

The real story is how the Windows Phone experience can now be rolled out to the Android and iPhone crowd at a low price-point. Windows Phone has drastically improved since its days as Windows Mobile 6.5. Microsoft has entirely binned the previous look and feel of the OS in order to bring in the Live Tiles, which can now be seen running on most Microsoft products.

Users can now enjoy the free music streaming software included with the Lumia 710, known as MixRadio and as Nokia says, “It delivers 100s of channels of locally-relevant music,”. There will also be a “global catalogue of millions of tracks.” Nokia is betting the farm on locally-produced music as a means to tap into each market, perhaps in a bid to become the emotional drivers of purchase.

Integrated Bing Search and Internet Explorer 9 drives the heart of the Lumia 710’s web experience, with the Windows Phone Marketplace filling the software gaps which the latest Nokia phone leaves out.