Nokia today announced a new UMA handset, the 6131. It’s an updated version of the 6101 handset that’s proved popular with operators because it’s made to be customized, while it’s been popular with consumers, particularly in the US, because of its relatively rich feature set for its low price (the company says it expects to sell the device in the tens of millions over its lifetime). It supports the US 850 and 1900 MHz frequencies, so expect to see it on T-Mobile in the US, alongside that operator’s launch of UMA services, rumored to be late in the second quarter. It also talked up its UMA network solution, making it clear that UMA will be a significant focus for the company this year.

There’s little doubt that UMA will be a disruptive force in the mobile telecom industry. It promises to meld the benefits of fixed or PC-based VoIP with those of mobile telephony. But why it’s so compelling for Nokia is that it gives them an opportunity to expand their pool of customers beyond just mobile operators. Sure, they go on about how mobile operators can leverage all their assets and plenty of other buzzphrases, saying UMA lets them boost network coverage and reduce costs as well as introduce new services. But it also gives plenty of companies that want to get into the mobile space a foothold — companies like cable operators, fixed-line companies, even strong Internet brands.

For someone like a cable operator, an MVNO using its own networks for UMA backhaul is a pretty compelling proposition. A fixed operator can offer a similar network, and for a diversified telecoms company, like France Telecom — say with its Wanadoo ISP and Orange mobile network in the UK — it makes even more sense. The telecoms infrastructure market is slowly melding fixed and mobile; for consumers this mix will happen even more quickly. By seizing on UMA, Nokia can expand outside its traditional networks sales area, and grow its carrier customer base.

What’s also interesting about the focus on UMA, and the rest of what Nokia’s talking about, is that it’s a voice product. Mobile data and services hasn’t gotten much more than just a mention (okay, I know somebody’s going to pop up and say “But voice is just another type of data”), and an announcement about an interop agreement with Sony Ericsson for DVB-H services. But even with all the hype around mobile television and mobile music and the like, the voice market is still growing, and mobile is taking an ever greater share. Other companies are talking up HSDPA and fast data connections. Not to say that Nokia’s got little interest in those products and other more data-intensive services. But voice is still a much more significant market than data, a point I think we sometimes forget in our excitement about new products and services.

In other news, Nokia also announced an agreement with Vodafone to push its Series 60 smartphone user interface. Combined with last week’s news that Nokia had teamed up with Freescale to create a reference design, the agreement serves to make it as easy as possible for companies to create Series 60 phones. Vodafone was an early European pioneer in using white-label handsets from Asian manufacturers; building a customized implementation on top of S60 that it can give or license to OEMs, which can then take the Freescale/Nokia reference design, should give the interface a significant boost — and Nokia and Symbian along with it. It will be interesting to see if Symbian has any new licensees to announce at its press event tomorrow.