Nokia knows they're an also-ran in the U.S. smartphone market and the company wants to do better, Colin Giles, a Nokia senior vice president and global head of sales for Nokia, said on a conference call Tuesday.

The company announced three new smartphones at its annual Nokia World conference today, but none of them are slated for U.S. carriers at the moment. While the E7, C7 and C6 will be sold directly through nokiausa.com, the lack of official carrier support means they'll remain mere curiosities here in the U.S. (Take a look at the slideshow below to see what U.S. consumers will be missing.)

"None of these products will be launched with operators in the U.S. ... U.S. consumers can buy them but they can't buy them on a U.S. plan," Giles said.

The world's number-one smartphone manufacturer is working hard to develop products for the U.S. market, though — and that means, first and foremost, pleasing U.S. carriers.

"We are looking at ways we can bring our products to market. That starts very much with the operator, and we're looking at ways to improve our operator collaboration," Giles said.

Nokia's recent smartphones for U.S. carriers, the 5230 Nuron and E73 Mode for T-Mobile, are lightly customized versions of global phones. But the company may even make custom smartphone hardware for U.S. carriers, the way it did with Verizon's Nokia 7705 Twist feature-phone.

"Are we looking at specific hardware? Yeah, why not," Giles said.

Giles said that in the past, Nokia didn't pay enough attention to U.S. carriers' strict RF requirements and hardware standards. That's changing, he said. The new Symbian^3 software platform, meanwhile, has gotten "very positive feedback" from U.S. carriers, he said.

Nokia draws the line, though, at making CDMA smartphones. That locks them out of five of the USA's top seven wireless carriers for now: Verizon Wireless, Sprint, US Cellular, MetroPCS and Cricket.

"We do WCDMA really well, and we'll take that one first," Giles said. WCDMA is Nokia-speak for the 3G system that AT&T and T-Mobile use, which is incompatible with Sprint and Verizon's CDMA.

The upcoming 4G LTE networks coming from Verizon Wireless and MetroPCS may provide Nokia some opportunities at those carriers, though.

"What we'd like to do longer-term is develop an LTE roadmap and bring products with those operators in on the new generation of platforms," Giles said.