Nokia Lumia 610 NFC Now Official at Orange

Today, Nokia made official the NFC-enabled flavor of its newly launched Nokia Lumia 610 smartphone, and announced a partnership with wireless carrier Orange for its release.

The new Lumia 610 NFC smartphone arrives on shelves with the same specs as the original device, and should keep the low price tag as well.

The difference is that it packs an NFC chip inside, and that users will be able to pair it with various accessories with the same capabilities that Nokia released.

“The Lumia 610 is the most affordable smartphone in the Lumia range, making it the perfect introduction to both Windows Phone and NFC for a younger, broader audience,” Nokia explains.

In addition to allowing easy pairing with other NFC-enabled devices, the handset will offer users the option to read NFC tags with a single tap.

“It also has all the necessary hardware and software for NFC payment and ticketing solutions. In fact, the Lumia 610 NFC has been certified for contactless payments both with MasterCard for their PayPass solution, and with Visa’s mobile application for payments at the point of sale, Visa payWave,” Nokia notes.

The NFC features inside this handset also enable users to easily exchange items such as photos or contact information from a phone to another through simply putting them together. There are also NFC-compatible accessories coming from Nokia for users to connect to.

In fact, Nokia unveiled at the WIMA NFC 2012 event a series of such accessories, in addition to launching the new version of its Windows Phone device.

The list of compatible NFC-enabled accessories for the company’s NFC devices includes the Nokia BH-310 Bluetooth headset, the Nokia Play 360° omnidirectional speaker, the Nokia Essence wireless headset, and the Nokia Luna Bluetooth headset.

In the video embedded below, the same that leaked a few hours ago, unveiling the existence of this device, Nokia’s Andrea Bacioccola provides more details on how users can take advantage of the NFC features of the new Lumia 610 flavor.

As stated above, Nokia announced that the new device version will become available on Orange’s network, but did not offer further details on the matter.