Nokia this morning announced that it has started shipping its stylish, Windows Phone 7.5 Mango-powered smartphone Lumia 710 to customers in Taiwan (where it is sold alongside the Lumia 800).

Over the next week, the phone will hit shelves across Singapore, Hong Kong, India and Russia – no other global roll-out details were announced for the time being.

The estimated retail price is 270 euros, excluding taxes and subsidies.

From our original coverage when the Lumia phones were announced:

The 710 (formerly known as the Sabre) is the chunkier of the two, but that doesn’t mean it’s a slouch when it comes to hardware. It repackages the same 1.4GHz processor as seen in the Lumia 800, and pairs it with a 3.7-inch WVGA screen, and a 5-megapixel rear camera. It’s meant to be Nokia and Microsoft’s effort to capture a more budget-conscious audience, and it’s heartening to see Nokia give it the same performance potential as their more premium offering.

Though the 710 only sports 8GB of internal storage, it beats out its brother by including a microSD card slot that can accept up to 16GB of additional flash storage. It also bears the distinction of being one of the few Windows Phone with physical navigation keys, which is sure to please fans of tactile feedback.

Expect to see it hit shelves in both stealth black and crisp white, with multiple colored backplates to please the chromatically indecisive.

On a sidenote: I’ve been using Nokia’s Lumia 800 for a week now, and it’s pretty bad-ass.

More on that later, hopefully this weekend.

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