Nokia has unveiled its new flagship model – the Nokia N97, complete with touchscreen, full qwerty keyboard and the hopes of the Finnish nation.
The N97 takes over, unsurprisingly, from the N96 as the phone giant’s key flagship product, competing with the likes of Apple’s iPhone 3G and the likes of Sony Ericsson’s X1, BlackBerry Storm and Samsung Omnia.
However, it will be six months before the Nokia N97 gets to market, and with the company’s rivals raising their game in the wake of the arrival of Apple in 2007, the phone will need to be something a little special.
“This is really the start of the new N-series … really kicking off the next wave,” Jonas Geust, vice president of Nokia’s Devices unit,” told Reuters.
“What would there be these days without touch? Touch for this category of devices is going to be important. Qwerty is also going to be important.”
The Nokia N97 handset has been priced at €550 which equates to £467 at current conversion rates and is expected to ship at the beginning of H1 – around July.
The screen will be a 3.5in, 640×360, 16:9 affair, and the phone will also feature a slide-out qwerty keyboard, HSDPA, Wi-Fi, 32GB of onboard memory with microSD expansion and a battery life of 36 hours for audio playback.
Nokia has also put a far-better-than-iPhone 5MP camera into the mixer, with Carl Zeiss lens and ‘DVD quality’ video capture.
Nokia has already termed the N97 the ‘world’s most advanced mobile computer‘.
