Nokia N97 Announced with Slide, Touch and a Tilt

So much for Wednesday – the big announcement from Nokia World has dropped today instead, and it’s the N97 – a touchscreen slider with all the slanty goodness of the TyTN II due to hit store shelves in the first half of 2009 for EUR 550. We had heard rumours of a touchscreen N-series coming down the pipes, and it turns out they were right! Here are the N97’s specifications:

System: WCDMA 900/1900/2100 (HSDPA), EGSM 850/900/1800/1900 MHz
User Interface: S60 5th Edition
Dimensions:117.2 x 55.3 x 15.9 mm*mm (L x W x H) *18.25 mm at camera area
Weight:Approx. 150 g
Display:3.5 inch TFT with up to 16 million colors, nHD 16:9 widescreen (640×360 pixels)
Battery: Nokia Battery BP-4L, 1500 mAh
Memory:Up to 48GB (32 GB on-board memory, plus 16GB expansion via microSD memory card slot)
Video playback:MPEG-4 / SP and MPEG-4 AVC/H.264,up to 30 fps, up to VGA resolution, RealVideo up to QCIF @ 30 fps, Windows Media (WMV9) up to CIF @ 30 fps, Flash Lite 3.0 / Flash Video in internet browser
Music playback:MP3, AAC, eAAC, eAAC+, WMA
Camera Lens:Carl Zeiss Tessar™
Image capture: Up to 5 megapixels (2584 x 1938) JPEG/EXIF (16.7 million/24-bit color)
Video capture:MPEG-4 VGA (640 x 480) at up to 30 fps
Aperture:F2.8
Focal length:5.4 mm
Flash:Dual LED camera flash and video light
Talk time:Up to 320 min (3G), 400 min (GSM)
Standby time:Up to 400 hrs (3G), 430 hrs (GSM)
Video playback:Up to 4,5 hours (offline mode)
Music playback:Up to 37 hours (offline mode)
Connectivity & Data Services: WLAN IEEE 802.11b/g with UPnP support, Micro-USB connector, Hi-Speed USB 2.0, 3.5mm stereo headphone plug and TV-out support (PAL/NTSC), Bluetooth wireless technology 2.0 with A2DP stereo audio, enhanced data rates (EDR), GPS receiver with support for assisted GPS (A-GPS)

Social networking is apparently a big part of this handset, as it will make good use of GPS to integrate into services like Ovi and Friend View, although it’s really being marketed as a miniaturized laptop more than anything else. There’s still a fairly distinct line between UMPC and smartphone that the E-series Communicator straddles a little better than the N97 here, but we’ll let that slide. The N97 is also sporting a lot of draggable home screen widgets, a look reminiscent of Android and the TouchWiz UI. An S60 widget development platform has been in the works for awhile now, so you can expect third parties will be jumping on this one real soon. It looks like a great step to improving the smoothness of the Symbian experience and should make a solid addition to the N series. Pretty cool, huh? Who wants one?

[via Nokia]

Pictures and videos of the Nokia N97 after of the jump!