Nokia's new product line up

THE FINNISH phone maker's keynote speech launching its annual Nokia World symposium added more details to last week's announcements, which included its 3G Booklet along with some new additions to the firm's Comes With Music range.

Nokia's CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo launched the keynote by saying last week's news of the netbook and N900 internet tablet was just to "whet the appetite". Although many saw the pre-Nokia World announcements as grabbing the headlines first, as the news could be drowned out by IFA in Berlin, the large consumer trade show that starts around the same time as Nokia World.

New details came out in the keynote of pricing for Nokia's N97 Mini, its 3G Booklet netbook and its latest Comes With Music handsets, the X3 and X6.

The N97 mini was shown at the event, after the rumour-mill went into overdrive over the past few weeks and leaked shots appeared everywhere. This 3.2-inch touch-screen Qwerty keyboard based handset with 8GB builds on the success of the N97 and comes in at €450. It's set to ship some time in the fourth quarter.

Nokia's N900 Linux-based Internet tablet comes in at €500 and is its first phone-based Internet tablet, as past N810 and N770 models had no phone elements at all. 80 per cent of its code base is open source, with its own section in the Nokia Ovi store opening soon. The N900 will arrive in the US in October. It is aimed at tech savvy adopters.

The Windows 7 Intel Atom based fanless 3G Booklet boasts 12 hours of battery life and is priced at €575. It arrives with WiFi and native 3G/HSDPA support and it could become a good dongle-less device for solid Internet access everywhere.

The other devices that Nokia announced were somewhat of a surprise as they weren't leaked beforehand. These were the Comes With Music X6 32GB and X3 mobile phones. These two are priced at €450 and €115, respectively, with the X6 bundeled with the all you can eat music service. The X6 has a 3.2-inch capacitive screen touchscreen, whereas the X3 is a slider based handset.

Nokia was in Apple bashing mode in its speech where it showed a slide highlighting the cost of Itunes compared to Comes With Music. To download the top 100 UK albums in any given week using Itunes would cost €934, whereas the equivalent downloads would be free over Nokia's Comes With Music service that's provided free with one of its phones.

Also unveiled was Life-casting, a new function tying in Facebook to Nokia's Ovi map service, where users can broadcast their locations from a Nokia handset to a Facebook status update. This is on the N97 Mini and will soon be coming to the N97 handset in the announced 2.0 October firmware update, whilst the beta is already out at Nokia labs today. µ