AT&T (NYSE: T) Mobility starts selling Nokia’s 6650 smartphone today, a small, but significant step for the Finnish handset maker. Though Nokia (NYSE: NOK) is the world’s leading handset maker with a total market share of 39 percent, it has struggled to crack the US market, where it was once the leader. Research firm Strategy Analytics puts it Q2 market share at 8.4 percent, just ahead of Apple (NSDQ: AAPL), with a 5.7 percent of the market. The handset, a clamshell model that looks very similar to Motorola’s RAZR, is priced at $70 on a two-year contract, after a $50 rebate. It includes one-click access to the operator’s GPS Service, AT&T Navigator, as well as links to AT&T’s video sharing and music services. Nokia has been trying hard to boost its market share in the US. After several years of ignoring carriers and seeing its market share high of 28 percent in 2002 dwindle away, the device maker has been wooing them by promising to tailor handsets specifically to their needs. Still, the company has a steep hill to climb. With Apple just behind it in market share on the back of a single phone model, Nokia needs to do a lot more wooing and tailoring at a time when the competition couldn’t be fiercer (release).

In another announcement today, Nokia lowered its market growth outlook in the face of “a sharp pull back in global consumer spending,” brought on it said by the combination of “the global economic slowdown” and “unprecedented currency volatility.” It expects industrywide shipments of around 330 million units in the fourth quarter, and 1.24 billion phones for the full year, down from a previous forecast of 1.26 billion phones. Nokia, however, says it expects to maintain its market share or for it to increase slightly in the fourth quarter from Q3, not great news considering phone sales typically get a boost in Q4 from the holidays (release).