Nokia N900 launch date gets delayed till Dec 4

The official reason for the delay is that Nokia did not apparently anticipate such a huge pre-order demand for the phone. A little bird told us that the demand for N900 has far outstripped Nokia's supplies and the company will be giving priority to customers who have pre-ordered the handset.

However, according to industry sources, Nokia is also facing some technical glitches with the Linux-based Maemo OS and hence, the delay. The company is also reportedly burning the midnight oil to get N900 flooded with firmware updates.

It is noteworthy to mention that N900 is Nokia's first smartphone to run on the latest version of open source Linux-based Maemo 5 OS, which promises to perform "PC like" multitasking (a feature it shares with iPhone rival Palm Pre) besides providing some compelling "desktop" (mobile-top?) personalization features. In other words, you can upload and use personal photos and images as desktop backgrounds, create intelligent contact shortcuts, add, edit and delete widgets, and display shortcuts to your favourite applications and websites.

The revolutionary Maemo browser (which is Mozilla-based, can run Firefox 3.0 add-ons, and can handle any webpage with ease, including the extremely Flash-heavy Webkinz and Hulu) is almost a full fledged, touch optimised Firefox browser with complete HTML, Flash, Javascript and other web standard support. In other words, websites on N900 look the same (if only with a smaller symbols and elements) as they would look on a desktop PC with 800-pixel wide resolution display.

N900's other treats include TI OMAP 3430:ARM Cortex-A8 600 MHz processor; PowerVR SGX graphics card with OpenGL ES 2.0 support; a 3.5-inch WVGA resistive touchscreen display with 800x480 resolution; a stunning 5-megapixel camera (with Carl Zeiss optics, Tessar lens, 3x digital zoom, autofocus, dual LED flash and multiple capture modes); WVGA video recording (@25fps); Adobe Flash 9.4 support; media player with support for multiple audio and video playback formats; GPS with A-GPS support; Ovi Maps; geo-tagging; TV-out; 3.5mm AV connector; microUSB connector, a nifty kickstand and an infrared port.

N900's connectivity and networking features include HSPA 3G, Bluetooth 2.1, GPRS, EDGE and WiFi.

The smartphone also features a slide-out full landscape-oriented Qwerty tactile keyboard and a full Qwerty onscreen keyboard.

N900 is also an excellent messaging device as it supports Mail for Exchange, IMAP, POP3 and SMTP.

Nokia has also integrated its communications capabilities in N900. For instance, when you select a contact, you're offered a choice of communication options such as Ovi by Nokia, Skype, Google Talk, Jabber and SIP.