Nokia N97 possibly gets release date – 31st March

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There’s a lot of people out there, myself included, eager for the N97, hoping it’ll be a valid rival from Nokia to the omnipresent iPhone. Well, perhaps there isn’t too long to wait after all, given that over the weekend, Play.com put up a pre-order page for Nokia’s next flagship device. In fact, it’s still up at the time of writing.

That page confidently claims that the N97 will arrive on the 31st March, and cost the princely sum of £480 sim- and contract-free, and unlocked. There’s some specs too – I’ve listed them over the jump. Now… any advice on how to scrape together £480 by the end of March? Answers in the comments please.

Nokia launches N97 – new touchscreen behemoth

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Yesterday, Nokia execs teased the world’s tech bloggers by saying that they had a big announcement, and were surprised that it hadn’t leaked. I’m surprised too – the big announcement is the N97. It’s the followup to their brilliant, and ridiculously successful N95, and semi-upgrade the N96.

The specs on this baby promise a lot. It’ll have a 3.5″, 640 x 360 touchscreen display (16:9, not 16:10), a QWERTY keyboard, HSDPA and Wi-Fi, 32GB(!) of onboard memory, a 5 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics, “DVD-quality” video capture (eat that, iPhone), and a battery that promises to pump out a day and a half of continuous audio playback. No mention of GPS, but I’d be very surprised if it lacks it.

Best of all, Nokia promises an ‘always-open’ window to the internet and social networking sites. If that integration runs clearly through the phone, it could be very powerful indeed. This is Nokia’s answer to the iPhone. The specs certainly win the day, but can they crack the all-important interface? We’ll have to wait and see.

Nokia N97 (via N96 Bruce Lee edition – enter the handset | MWC 2008: Nokia N96 versus Nokia N95

First touchscreen Nokia N-Series phone out by the end of the year

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So, the Tube didn’t turn out to be quite the iPhone-killer that it was billed to be back in the Stone Age when it was first mooted, but Finland’s most famous export has promised to put right what once went wrong by pledging to bring a touchscreen Nokia N-Series phone to the market before the end of the year.

The director of marketing of Nokia India, Devinder Kishore, said…