The Nokia N97 launched early this year has just been kicked off the top of the totem pole with its newer and heftier successor as Nokia’s flagship mobile phone – the Nokia N900. After months of speculation on the net with countless product leaks, the Finnish mobile phone giant has finally put them all to rest with the official announcement that the new N900 will be arriving in October at a not-so-surprising price point starting at €500. Not bad for a high-end touchscreen and QWERTY slider that falls into an emerging breed of MID or Memo Internet Tablets and it only comes in black. Let’s take quick look at its ravishing features.

This is a hefty mobile phone with a 110.9 × 59.8 × 20 mm dimension and weighs about 180 grams that’s really intended for the tech-savvy mobile internet user with social networking proclivities. So forget about putting this on a shirt or pant pocket.  You need a belt phone holster.  Tech savvy executives can carry this around in their brief case or laptop back packs.  It’s the next best thing to using a netbook.

Upscale Features

On the surface, the N900 is identical with the Nokia N97 sporting a large 3.5? touchscreen with a tactile QWERTY slide-out keyboard and other body design features except the tilt-up screen of the N97 when fully slid-out. Other than that, you get the following:

• Its screen is significantly better with a true WVGA resolution (800×480) that supports 24-bit color depth at a widescreen aspect ratio of 16:9.

• It is powered by a Texas-Instruments based ARM Cortex A8 processor clocked at 600MHz assisted by the OpenGL ES 2.0 graphics acceleration for desktop-like rendering of images.

• It runs the Linux-based Maemo 5 operating system instead of the Symbian S60 OS of its earlier N97 predecessor.

• Underneath its sophisticated upscale slider design, the N900 is a quad-band GSM/EDGE, 900/1700/2100MHz UMTS/HSPA.

• It comes with stupendous 32GB of internal storage with about 1 GB of application memory.  If still wanting, you can use its microSD slot to expand it with at most a 48GB microSD card.

• It’s bundled with the Maemo internet browser from Mozilla that supports Adobe Flash 9.4.

• You get an Integrated GPS receiver, Assisted-GPS, and Cell-based receivers supported by pre-loaded Ovi Maps.

• There’s a 5 megapixel light-assisted autofocus camera with the usual Carl Zeiss optics and Tessa lens aided with dual-LED flash CMOS sensor, 3× digital zoom and automatic geo-tagging.

• WVGA video recording at a near film-quality 25 frames per second rounds out its excellent multimedia features.

Conclusion

Whichever way you look at it, the Nokia N900 brings the speed and power of desktop computing on the road like no other mobile phones can.  The Maemo OS gives Nokia a continuing leadership edge in the fast evolving mobile phone industry that is merging the power of new computing technologies with the internet in the palm of your hands. Slated to appear next month at the Nokia World event, expect the anticipation for the handset to reach new highs before its release in October.