Nokia’s N97 is the first touchscreen in the company’s N-series, with some pundits believing it’ll take on the iPhone and possibly win. What is impressing most techies is its 32GB of memory, expandable up to 48GB with an SD card, its touchscreen functionality and kick slide, as well as the ability to watch movies.

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The new unit supports gestures and swipes, and the interface is claimed  to be very responsive. There is also a 5 megapixel camera, GPS, Wi-Fi, a proper QWERTY keypad to cater for finger-poking media fans and e-mailers. But the one thing that has tongues wagging is that with all those features, it is slimmer than the 8GB N95.

Other features to impress are a revamped Symbian operating system, widgets on its homescreen, the ability to run N-Gage games, plus 3D accelerated graphics.

As mentioned it has the ability to watch movies, but its screen isn’t just widescreen, it’s a 16:9 widescreen, which means you’ll be able to watch films without annoying black bars at the top and bottom of the picture.

Nokia says the N97 will give your social location, which means social networks will be able to access the phone’s GPS chips, so you can share your location with friends – this is the first phone to be able to do this as a built-in function.

While Apple’s Flash player for iPhone is still in development, and Android only has a proof-of-concept, the N97 can play back Flash video fine. That means any website it visits will display perfectly, with embedded clips and animations working to perfection.

Full internet on your phone? So far, Nokia’s the only one to really deliver it.

The phone will be available in Australia in the near future, although Nokia is being coy as to the exact launch date.

RRP
TBC