Extreme SmartPhone

Nokia, once King of the Mobiles, has been dragging its heels of late. It's almost like the Finnish company was having a party and the iPhone turned up, ate all the cake and started playing hide and seek with the girls. Nokia threw its toys from the pram and refused to play until the iPhone went home.

One zillion iPhones later and Nokia has realized that nobody is listening to its cries anymore. Today we see the company's new N97, a touchscreen and QWERTY equipped "multimedia computer" (remember, Nokia doesn't make phones anymore) that is a clear answer to Apple's precocious device. What's inside?

On paper, it's a solid iPhone-beater. In fact, it should probably come with a dirty white undershirt and half a bottle of whiskey. The camera is a Zeiss lens equipped 5MP model with an LED flash and a video mode, the phone sports a huge 32GB of memory, boost-able to 48GB with microSD cards, 3G comes in HSDPA flavor and there is Wi-Fi in the shape of 802.11b and g.

In addition, there is real and faux GPS, just like the iPhone,and an accelerometer and a compass (like the G1 Googlephone). But take a look at it. Fitting in all that gear has made the N97 a little chubby. There's another problem, too -- the handset won't be available for another six months, time enough for the rest of the world to move on. How much? €550, or around $695 in today's dollars.

Sees 2009 handset market volume down 5 pct or more
* Q4 earnings to suffer
* Says recent impact more pronounced in emerging markets
* Sees 2009 broader equipment market down 5 pct or more (Adds company quotes, details, updates shares)
By Tarmo Virk and Sinead Carew
HELSINKI/NEW YORK, Dec 4 (Reuters) - Sales of mobile phones are shrinking faster than expected as consumers are cutting spending, the world's top cellphone maker Nokia said on Thursday in its second warning in three weeks.
"Consumers are continuing dramatically to cut back their spending," Nokia Chief Financial Officer Rick Simonson said at the company's investor day in New York, adding that he was under "no illusions" that the market would recover any time soon. "We're facing it across the world. What's recently accelerated is the slowdown in emerging markets," he said.
Nokia said handset market volumes are expected to fall by at least 5 percent next year, something many analysts were already expecting. But it sees its market share rising, helping to lift its stock 4 percent to 11.02 euros in Europe. Nokia's U.S. shares were up 54 cents or 4 percent at $13.84 on the New York Stock Exchange in afternoon trading.