Don't spell doom and gloom for Nokia just yet. The Finnish mobile giant is very much alive and kicking - close on the heels of the launch of flagship Windows Phone Lumia 900, on Wednesday, Nokia launched the Lumia 610, a low-end Windows Phone that will have NFC (Near Field Communication) technology built in and ready to rumble.

Windows Phone does not support NFC out of the box, but due to Nokia's close relationship with Microsoft, the company was able to add a NFC stack on top of the Windows Phone code to get the tech on the Lumia 610.

Do you know what this means? Until Windows 8 aka Apollo takes center stage later in 2012, no other Windows Phone device apart from Nokia's own offerings will come equipped with NFC. The NFC version of the Lumia 610 will launch first in Europe on Orange, which boasts over 500,000 NFC devices on its network.

The Nokia Lumia 610 will support NFC payment systems from both Visa and Mastercard, making it the perfect tool to shop with at any NFC supported location around the world. Making and receiving payments is not the only NFC feature the Lumia 610 is capable of. We are given to understand that the device will also support Nokia's own Wireless NFC Bluetooth Headset. Users can connect their device with the NFC Bluetooth headset by simply tapping both devices together. This makes for an easier Bluetooth connection than the old way of doing things, which can be a pain sometimes.

Wednesday's launch of the Nokia Lumia 610 with NFC took place in Monaco, at the Global NFC Products, Applications & Services Congress. A fitting place to launch the very first Windows Phone with NFC, which also turned out to be Nokia's 8^th NFC device.

A little history you might want to know: Nokia holds the record of being the first company to incorporate NFC in a mobile phone. Hence, Nokia's push to get NFC up and running on a Windows Phone as quickly as possible.

The Nokia Lumia 610 is a low-end Windows Phone device. It sports 256MB RAM, 8GB storage with 25GB of free space via SkyDrive, 3.7-inch Corning Gorilla Glass display, HSDPA, 7.2 Mbps; HSUPA, 5.76 Mbps, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, 5-megapixel camera with autofocus and LED flash, and an 800MHz CPU.

(reported by Vamien MacKalin, edited by Surojit Chatterjee)