For more than a year now, everyone has been craving Nokia’s follow-up to its ultimate N95 handset. The N96 was announced and fell well short of people’s expectations.  Everybody  was expecting something “big” from Nokia, and they finally delivered it today at Nokia World.  Here comes the Nokia N97, a perfect all-round handset that brings so many new offerings to the table, it makes you wonder where we have come from and where we are now.

The Nokia N97 is a slide-out tilt screen Qwerty Nseries device from Nokia, running Symbian S60 5th edition. This means that it’s from the new wave of touchscreen S60 devices, and on that note it sports a 3.5inch TFT display with up to 16 million colors and a 16:9 widescreen 640×360 pixels resolution. It’s the first Nseries device from Nokia to have a Qwerty keyboard, the first to sport a touchscreen and the first to have a high-resolution display. It’s also the first Nseries device to offer a customizable standby screen, with add-on widgets like email, application shortcuts, social networks, calendar, weather…

The N97 comes with 32GB of built-in memory, which is expandable thanks to its microSDHC slot. This means that you can get up to 48GB of memory right now, and 64GB in the near future. It also has a 5 MegaPixel Carl Zeiss powered camera, with dual-LED flash, and VGA video recording, which has become standard in all the latest Nseries offering, and guarantee amazing picture and video quality. It also comes with a TV-Out cable so you can enjoy hook it up to a TV display and show all these images and videos, or surf the web for example.

The N97 is also GPS-enabled, with A-GPS support as well as an electronic compass so that you always know where you exactly are, and how to walk/drive to your next destination with Nokia Maps. The N97 also brings N-Gage to touchscreen handsets, with a multitude of high-quality games and a great community and competition aspect.

But that’s not all, the N97 has microUSB charging, Hi-Speed USB 2.0 transfers, stereo speakers, bluetooth with A2DP, WiFi, tri-band HSDPA with support for the 900/1900/2100 bands (European and American), a 3.5mm headset plug for music, and a 1500mAh battery to run it all with a standby time of more than 400 hours.

The Nokia N97 should be available in the first half of 2009 for a retail price of 550Euro before taxes and subsidies. Personally, I can’t wait to get it!