Nokia releases new flagship N97

Nokia has just released a new flagship phone to top the line of it’s current generation. The N97 (pdf) makes a break away from the traditional Nokia form factor for it’s latest top end phones and switches to a sliding communicator form factor with a slide out QWERTY keyboard and a 3.5inch resistive touchscreen with tactile feedback (including a virtual keyboard to complement the physical one, it’s just a shame it’s not capacitive). The screen has an unusual resolution of 640x360, a 16:9 aka ‘widescreen’ ratio which will make watching movies and TV a blast. The home screen of the N97 also includes customisable widgets that include your favourite web services, social networking sites or any type of media you need fast access to.

More details, product videos and product shots after the break.

Nokia is touting it as the ‘world’s most advanced mobile computer’ which isn’t a surprise considering it’s marketing for the previous flagship the N95 as ‘what computers have become’. To back this claim up however they have HSDPA, WiFi (b/g) and Bluetooth (including AD2P) on board as well as the now standard A-GPS. The N97 also packs a massive 32Gb of onboard memory and microSD expansion (so that’s a possible total of 48Gb for those of you who are counting). Nokia sticks with the trend from the N9x series and gives you a 3.5mm jack for your headphones yet breaks the mould with 1.5 days worth of music playback or 4.5 hours of video playback from the onboard battery. Talk time is rated at 320mins for 3G (400mins GSM) and standby at 400hrs for 3G (430hrs GSM). The camera also boasts that fantastic 5MP camera with Carl Zeiss optics that adorned it’s predecessors with ‘DVD quality’ video capture at 30fps (it’s a pity they couldn’t squeeze in 720p but you can’t have everything now can you?). Media playback includes codec support for MPEG-4/SP and MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 (30fps, VGA), RealVideo (QCIF, 30fps), Windows Media (WMV9) (CIF, 30fps) and Flash Lite 3.0/Flash Video. On the audio side the built in player includes support for MP3, AAC, eAAC, eAAC+ and WMA.

On paper the specs look amazing and with a shipment date of the first half of 2009 for ~£468 (€550 or ~$693) (off network) it’ll be a very hotly anticipated handset to be sure. It will be interesting to see which network carriers pick this beomoth up both in the UK and the US and to see whether that S60 5th Edition operating system can still cut the mustard. Will this be the next iPhone killer? Would it be better with Android running on it? All these questions and more will have to wait till next year but for now the speculation continues. In the mean time check out the videos and gallery below for more of the N97.







[Press Release]