iPhone Rival Watch: Nokia announces N97 mobile computer

Nokia has today announced the N97, its latest smartphone / mobile computer (use whichever term you prefer).

It features an iPhone-rivalling 3.5-inch slide-and-tilt touchscreen plus a full QWERTY keyboard, multiple sensors, A-GPS with an electronic compass, Nokia Maps and Ovi, up to 48GB of storage (32GB onboard), Nokia Music Store support, five megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss Tesssar lens and dual LED camera flash/video light, DVD-quality video capture, and HSDPA / Wi-Fi connections.

Not only is it well equipped for multimedia, but Nokia is making a big thing of "social location". This isn't unique to Nokia, of course, but it's an increasingly popular concept - that mobile users can find out where they are, where their friends are, and then convey that information via online social networks.

The home page can be customised with widgets, video and TV should look great on the 16:9 display, and the improved Nokia Maps service allows for detailed 3D imagery for 216 cities, terrain maps, and new route planning options.

The battery should get you 320 minutes of 3G talk time (400 minutes on GSM), 400 hours standby, 4.5 hours of offline video playback or 37 hours of offline audio playback.

Sounds like a pretty nifty handset to me, and something that Apple should easily be able to surpass on the next incarnation of the iPhone.

Nokia will ship the N97 in the first half of 2009, and it will have an estimated retail price of €550 (about £465) before subsidies.

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