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.