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As with Apple and Sprint before it, Nokia announced this week it is getting into the movie business. For the Finnish phone maker this means the premier of the latest installment in the 'Mission Impossible' series on a memory card - exclusively for its Nseries of multimedia handsets - to coincide with the film's DVD release.

In partnership with Paramount Pictures, Nokia is offering a full length version of 'Mission Impossible III' (or M:i:III, as it’s referred to) on a 512 MB miniSD card in a special bundle with the N93 camcorder smartphone. The movie runs at 25 frames per second in stereo on the mobile handset, and, as with a DVD, users can rewind, fast forward, and stop M:i:III when watching the film on its 2.4-inch QVGA (320 x 240 pixel) color screen.

The aim of making M:i:III available to a Nokia smartphone in such a limited way is to highlight the mobile phone vendor's N93 camcorder smartphone as not just a platform to record movies but to play them as well.

"With this package, we want to highlight that the Nokia N93 is not only a fantastic movie-making device, but that it is also a portable video player, allowing users to enjoy movies wherever, whenever," said Tuula Rytila-Uotila, Nokia's director of multimedia in a statement. "You can even watch movies on an airplane with the device in offline mode.”

But shouldn’t other Nseries models be able to play the film?

Nokia and Paramount have not disclosed what video format the movie is in. And while you can't play the film on a PC or copy it to another memory card, Nokia said in its announcement - somewhat incongruously, it seems - that you can store M:i:III on a desktop by copying it over from the N93, thus freeing up the miniSD card for other purposes.

So does M:i:III on miniSD implement some type of digital rights management (DRM) protection or not?

On All About Symbian, there's a comment from a reader that offers up the following possible explanation: When you first play the movie on the N93 the smartphone’s International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) number is stamped onto the miniSD card, preventing M:i:III from being played - but not copied - onto other devices. IMEIs are unique to every single mobile phone: You can typically find it behind the battery.

At this time, while Nokia is clearly now in the music distribution business - through its purchase of Loudeye, which powers MSN and MTV's music stores, along with more than 60 other audio services - there's no (announced) business model for getting other movies besides M:i:III onto its mobile handsets.

It’s not like that film is being widely distributed among its cell phones. M:i:III is only being offered for a single smartphone, right?

In the meantime, could it be possible that by demonstrating how you can view an entire movie on its smartphones - without giving users a mechanism or store to obtain films themselves - Nokia is inadvertently encouraging users to rip their own DVDs for this purpose? That would at least enable folks to watch a wide variety of films on their mobile handset.

Although Nokia recently began disrupting the N93 more widely in the U.S., the company is only shipping the bundle with the free M:i:III miniSD card in Europe. “We look forward to seeing consumers across Europe enjoying M:i:III on their Nokia N93 devices this holiday season," according to Rytila-Uotila.

At this point, unlike what Nokia is doing with its Loudeye buy as well as many music phones and smartphones for the music download market, the phone vendor is still far away from being in a position to challenge Apple and others in the fledgling mobile movie business. Rather, today's announcement can be viewed as a signal by Nokia that it is in the game and ready to play. It is more of an early indication of what may be to come.

Lights! Camera! Action!
Ever since its introduction in the spring, Nokia has positioned the N93 as the ultimate mobile device for spontaneous video recording, with its 3.2 megapixel Carl Zeiss lens that enables it to take video with 3x zoom at 30 frames per second, stereo audio, and digital stabilization.

In fact, Nokia hired actor and director Gary Oldman to shoot a DVD-quality short film with the N93 to promote the smartphone and a new video sharing site (a la YouTube) called the Nokia Nseries Studio. The result, titled 'Donut,' is a two minute short featuring a round reflection of an inner tube in rippling water set to a soundtrack by a composer named Tor.

'Donut' is available for viewing on the Nokia Nseries Studio, which also features the work of a number of other directors Nokia refers to (somewhat over seriously) as "creative visionaries," in addition to clips taken by average Joes.

More impressive than Oldman's achievement is the full length 93-minute movie a pair of Italian filmmakers filmed last year using the predecessor to the N93, the N90. For a few thousand dollars, including travel expenses Marcello Mencarini and Barbara Seghezzi created "Nuovi Comizi D'Amore" ("New Love Meetings"), a homage to the 1965 documentary "Love Meetings" by Pier Paolo Pasolini, which showed interviews of people about their love lives.

The pair said the camera phone came in handy because it was light, not invasive, easy to use and - best of all - cheap. This allowed them to shoot a movie without having to follow rules of a traditional production.

Because of these inherent limitations of the technology compared to traditional filmmaking, the documentary mostly features close-ups of its subjects, who were interviewed about their love lives—about 1000 people over two months with around 100 making into the final product—as in Pasolini's original film.

More on N93
The tri-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE N93 runs on the Symbian 9.1 and S60 3rd Edition platforms and has the same twist and shoot form factor as the earlier N90 model.

It weighs 6.35 ounces and measures 4.65 x 2.19 x 1.11 inches.

The smartphone’s shooter has a flash and an active camera toolbar to display all available capture features, from exposure value to color tones and white balance. There are dedicated keys for shutter, zoom and flash and also a camera mode key that enables you to switch quickly between image and video capture as well.

While the N93 integrates 50 MB of memory, its miniSD card slot enables users to add up to 2 GB more storage for up to - Nokia asserts - 90 minutes of DVD-quality video or close to 2500 high-quality photos.

Additional specifications include a 2.4-inch QVGA display that supports up to 262,144 colors and a wide 160 degree viewing angle. There's also 802.11b/g Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.0, a digital music player, FM radio with visual radio, Universal Plug and Play, and TV-out.

The 1100 mAh lithium-ion battery is supposed to get 5.1 hours talk and 10 days standby time on a single charge.