NOKIA N900 IN MARKET ON OCTOBER

Waaaay back in May, we put up just shy of 750 words jam-packed with details on Nokia’s unannounced N900 Internet Tablet. This morning, Nokia finally pulled back the curtains on the device - and man, we absolutely nailed it.

Though we would have expected Nokia to announce this at next week’s Nokia World event, they’ve gone and verified all of the details we’d mentioned previously. 3.5″ 800×480 touchscreen? Check. 32GB internal storage? Check. 5 megapixel camera, T-Mobile USA friendly 1700mhz bands, and running Maemo 5? Three checks, please.

While we originally mentioned that Nokia’s target date for the US was July, that’s obviously come and gone. However, their target date for Europe has always been October, and it seems like they’ll see it through; beginning sometime in that month, the N900 will go on sale for €500 ($711 USD) before taxes and subsidies. We still fully expect this thing to show up on T-Mobile USA before too long.

This thing is a monster, and we can’t wait to get our hands on it. The specs we know so far:

• 32 GB onboard storage, expandable up to 48 with microSD.
• GPS and A-GPS
• FM Transmitter
• 1320 mAh battery
• TV-out
• Bluetooth
• 5 megapixel
• WiFi
• Bands: GSM Quad-Band 850, 900, 1800, 1900. WCDMA 900, 1700/2100, 2100 (This is Nokia’s first internet tablet with telephony support)
• 5 Megapixel camera w/ Carl Zeiss lens
• Mozilla browser w/ full Flash support

HIGHLIGHT: Of course, something else worth mentioning here is that it’s running Maemo 5, the latest build of Nokia’s Linux-based operating system. Maemo 5 is a complete overhaul, doing away with and rebuilding much of what we’ve seen before. The browser is based on the Mozilla engine (think Firefox), and has full Flash support. You can switch between running apps in a fashion similar to OS X’s Expose; just click the dashboard, and all of your running apps appear on screen for selection. They’ve tied copy-and-paste into the core of the OS here, allowing you to do copy any text to and from any application. There’s a ton going on here, and the new OS looks absolutely incredible; if you want to dive deeper into it, this NASCENT OS was given a fairly thorough run through a few days ago.