By Grant Shepherd

SYDNEY: Yesterday afternoon, Nokia Australia unveiled its latest smartphone, the N900. Retailers such as Harvey Norman and JB H-Fi have already signed on to stock the product when it is released in April. No carriers have yet been announced.

Speaking at the Forum Nokia Developer Conference in Sydney was Emile Baak, managing director of Nokia Australia and New Zealand. He was confident that this new device will help the company achieve even more growth in the future.

“Over the last year Nokia’s growth rate has been very healthy. Over the last couple of months Nokia users have grown by almost 100 per cent, as have the amount of downloads on the Ovi Store,” he said.

In addition, Baak highlighted that Australian consumers were some of the most accepting of Nokia’s application store.

“Despite a relatively small population of around 21 million people, Australia is actually in the top 15 countries for downloads on the Ovi Store,” he said.

“In addition, Australia is in the top five countries in terms of purchasing apps and is third in terms of worldwide revenue.”

Late last year, Baak highlighted that around one million downloads were being recorded every day on the Ovi Store. This figure has now grown dramatically to almost 1.5 million downloads a day.

The N900 is the first Nokia Linux-based handset and is being labelled as a ‘mobile computer’. It features a 3.5-inch touch-sensitive widescreen display, runs on the Maemo browser powered by Mozilla and is powered by a 600MHz processor.

One of the interesting aspects of the device is that it is actually designed to be used horizontally, and only rotates to a normal (vertical) view when dialling a phone number. Other features include a slide-out QWERTY keypad, 32GB of internal storage and a 5-megapixel digital camera.

The N900 comes at an RRP of $899 and will be available in April from leading electronic retailers including JB Hi-Fi and Harvey Norman. Telco specialists Crazy Johns, Telechoice and Allphones have also confirmed to sell the product.

Baak said that no carrier agreements could be announced at this stage.

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[Wed 03/03/2010 11:49:55]

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