Nokia N900

The Nokia N900 has finally been officially announced, slated for release in October 2009 with a price tag that might surprise you

Nokia N900 will come equipped with a slide-out QWERTY thumbboard, Quad-band GSM network support, 10/2 Mbps HSPA connectivity (with T-Mobile USA support) as well as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.1 support. Limited RAM has been an issue on the previous generation of Maemo based tablets, but the Nokia N900 will offer 256 MB RAM plus 768 MB virtual memory. This will especially be crucial for the desktop-grade, Mozilla based browser to deliver the goods as promised. The Nokia N900 is also powered by an ARM Cortex-A8 processor and 3D graphics acceleration with support for OpenGL ES 2.0.

The Nokia N900’s 3.5-inch WVGA display is of the resistive touchscreen kind, meaning that it responds both to finger and stylus navigation. A complete overview of the Nokia N900’s capabilities can be found here, revealing that Widgets will just be a small part of the package. Our hope is that Maemo 5 (check out videos of Maemo 5 here) and the N900 will silence the Widget craze to some extent, and that developers will be encouraged to develop real applications again.

In addition to the new Mozilla based browser, the Nokia N900 will offer a 5-megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics and dual LED flash. The camera should also be capable of recording WVGA video, while a front-faced camera will act as a VGA web camera. The smartphone will also be capable of video and audio playback, and offers up to 32GB of internal storage as well as a microSD memory slot capable of holding 16GB cards. A 3.5mm headphone jack has also been incorporated.

The Nokia N900 will be available in November 2009 with the healthy price tag of 500 EUR before taxes and carrier subsidies. Although the phone supports T-Mobile USA’s 3G network at 1700 MHz, it’s not yet known whether T-Mobile will actually start selling this phone in the U.S. In the last couple of months, several unlocked phones have been announced with this capability, and we doubt T-Mobile is planning to pick them all up, if any.