Victor Saeijs, Nokia’s Europe vice president announced that the phonemaker will debut Windows Phone 7-powered handsets in six European markets:  France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, and the UK. The U.S and Finland were not included in the list of initial markets the new devices will hit.

“Knowing Nokia, there’s no doubt that once the WP7 handsets are ready they’ll find themselves swiftly available worldwide, but if you care to be among the very first to own one, you’ll be wanting to visit Europe’s western shores.”

The handsets are the first fruits of Nokia’s $2 billion collaboration agreement with Microsoft, which followed the company’s realization that Symbian is indeed lagging behind the rest of the market, in more ways than one. For starters, it lost a lot of market share in Europe, largely to Android. This resulted in a very sudden 14 percent decline in stock several months ago, and was followed by a smaller 4.7 percent slide.

Nokia hopes that Windows Phone 7 will help it recuperate; so much so, it even has plans to shut down the Ovi Store by late 2012.

Over at Microsoft’s side Windows Phone 7 has been accelerating pretty fast recently, even though it currently accounts for only a small portion of the market compared to iOS and Android. However Microsoft is working hard to keep and continually expand its turf, with one of its main focuses being the WP7 ecosystem.

All the proportioning and development is beginning to show promising results, knowing many major app developers have already created Windows Phone 7 versions of their apps. The latest example is Evernote, the note-taking service that yesterday announced in a blog post the app is now available to WP7 users.