Nokia Corp and France Telecom’s Orange announced that they reached a three-year agreement for selling multimedia services on the new Nokia handsets. The deal will show its results in the second part of the year with a consistent campaign across nine major markets.

A partnership between the two was already signed in February, so this week’s deal can be considered an add-on to the initial contract.

The new features will offer customers direct access to the Orange Music Store, to the Orange games, also the NGage games and the new Nokia Maps application. The companies said that their plans include the creation of 10 million active Mobile Maps users on the Nokia devices by the year 2010.

Reuters presented the statement made by the head of Nokia’s device unit, Kai Oistamo, who said that his company is extremely pleased with the strategic partnership which is very likely to extend and enrich consumer choice. He also explained that his hopes for the close collaboration include a wider variety of activities, aside from the initial focus areas of music, games, maps and advertising.

Details about the contract are not disclosed but one of the certainties is that the customers will be charged directly on their Orange bills, without any need for credit card transactions.  

After T-mobile and Vodafone, Orange is the third global Mobile Phone provider to have reached an agreement with Nokia for its product distribution.