Nokia is planning to open a music store, exploit the European 3G network speeds, and allow users to download music directly to their phones, according to ITWire on Thursday.

In a ponderous presentation to the press in London Wednesday, Nokia outlined its plans to "renew" the company. Part of the plan is to merge the functionality of our modern electronic gadgets into a mobile phone, and then take the next step to merge those functions with the Internet.

The Nokia Music Store, which will open in Q3, 2007, will sell DRM'd music in WMA format, encoded at 192 kbps. In addition, using the faster Eurpoean 3G network, customers will be able to download music directly to their Nokia mobile phones.

In contrast, many believe the AT&T EDGE network in the U.S. is too slow to support reliable music downloads. Previously, Apple's Greg Joswiak seemed to support that notion when he said that iTunes "should live on the PC, not the iPhone," accoding to ITWire. However, most analysts expect Apple's European iPhone to be a 3G device, of not at first, then eventually.

The first Nokia phones that will work with the new music service will be the N81 and N95 models. Nokia reported on Wednesday that it sells one million phones per day world wide.

While it may take some time to get all the technology pieces working together, clearly Nokia is planning to aggressively meet the challenge of Apple, iTunes and the iPhone.