Nokia N900 Becomes Official, Release Date and Prices Confirmed [Nokia's First Linux-based Smartphone Takes on iPhone]

This morning, Nokia have launched a new class of smartphone to take the place of the N97 as its flagship product. The N900 is a combination of smartphones, like the N-series phones and the company’s “Internet tablets” — which by now failed to gain much in popularity mainly due to the lack of cellular radio in them.

The biggest change in the N900 from the other Nokia smartphones is that it does not use the Symbian S60 OS, but rather uses Nokia’s Linux variant named “Maemo 5″, which is the same software that runs on Nokia’s other internet tablet devices such as the N770 and N810.

But Nokia N900 is also different by featuring full HSPA-based 3G access with up to 10 Mbps download speeds and 2Mbps upload speeds. It boasts a much sharper 3.5-inch, 800×480 touchscreen, a 5-megapixel camera, 32 GB of internal memory and a microSD to up that for another 16GB.

The phone will have a slide-out full QWERTY keypad, up to 1GB of app memory ( 256 MB actual RAM ), true PC-like multitasking and like the iPhone, runs on a 600MHz ARM Cortex-A8 processor, although there’s a faster GPU that supports OpenGL ES 2.0 graphics features and full support for Flash 9.4. More to it there’s also features a new touch-friendly media player.

With a release date set for October, the new Nokia N900 is to be priced close to 500 euros which is some $712.