With smartphone increasingly picking pace with the consumer community, it is not only handset manufacturers which are proactively and aggressively working to cash on the opportunity. Reliance Communications for instance is betting big on the opportunity and is already in talks with leading players of the smartphone ecosystem.

The move is in lines with the company’s new focus on pushing increased revenues from data services.

To start with, the company is in the process of entering into a tie-up with Nokia to launch Nokia’s NMS (Network Management System) service on RCom’s mobile network. This will allow RCom to offer enhanced mobile email services to its subscribers with potential bundling of such services with its data services plans. According to RCom, Nokia  will invest in backend servers to support the NMS service and will also play licence fess to global ISPs.

RCom says that the with almost negligible investment in infrastructure to be able to deliver these services, the new smartphone focus will result in increased subscriber base of data users and increased margin per user. The service will be available on about 25 Nokia smartphones. Also users of Nokia smartphone will be offered 200 MB of free data usage per month for a period of six months.

Mahesh Prasad, President - Marketing, Reliance Communications, says, “In the last two quarters, the adoption of smartphones have seen a surge. We have seen sales of smartphones including Blackberry on our Network increase manifold. Growth of Smartphones will certainly drive up data revenues. RCOM will offer Voice + Data bundles on numerous smartphones across various brands aimed at high-end post-paid and pre-paid customers. We are also planning to offer bundled Android handsets during the first quarter of this fiscal.”

Apart from this, the company is also planning to offer free data plans with some of the top selling smartphone models. Some of the players with whom the company is involved in talks include Nokia, Samsung, LG smartphones and Blackberry devices.

 For Samsung’s Omnia users, RCom will offer bunbled 5GB free data usage per month for 6 months. Similarly for BlackBerry users, RCOm plans to offer access to social networking sites as well as BlackBerry chat services for Rs.299 per month.

The company says that with LG it is in talks to launch smartphones with Microsoft Windows 7 OS. Similar smartphones will also be launched by Samsung with such handsets to be rolled out by Q3 of this fiscal.

The company is also set to place an order for 300,000 Android-based handsets valued at Rs.500 crore. For this it is in talks with Samsung, LG and Motorola.