This Reuters story about Nokia's excellent first-quarter financial results got my gander up, because it shows how the world's #1 cell-phone manufacturer continues to treat North America as somewhere lower than Zimbabwe on its priority list.

Here's the paragraph that really drove me nuts: "The Finnish company [...] benefited in the first quarter from strong sales of its N-series multimedia phones, such as the N70 model, the top revenue generator for the company in the quarter."

The N70 is not available in the US. And the only one of Nokia's high-end N-series phones available in the US, the N90, isn't sold in any carrier's stores, where the vast majority of US handset sales happen. Yes, Nokia announced phones for us recently, but they're all relatively bland, midrange models. They'll sell -- the midrange Nokia 6101/6102 (at left) are apparently burning up the Cingular and T-Mobile sales counters -- but they don't push technology forwards. (Neither does T-Mobile's announcement that they'll be selling the Nokia 8801, which is cool but much more design-oriented than feature-heavy.)

This is not all Nokia's fault. Picky carriers hold back phones in the US, and US consumers are much more interested in design and price than they are in features. But still, as the world's #1 manufacturer wonders why they're #4 in the USA, not getting high-end, high-margin phones into carrier stores must be part of the equation.