N97: At last Nokia comes out with the iPhone killer

With the mixed opinions on how well the T-mobile G1 Android based mobile phone performed against the Apple iPhone, it looks like Nokia is sending a loud message — “Watch and learn boys!”

I really love the idea of having an open mobile platform such as Android because of the freedom and possibilities it gives to mobile phone owners but I guess I will have to wait a while before the mobile platform will mature. Apple with its exquisite engineering prowess has always led the world in creating great engineering worksmanships like the iPod, Macbook and the iPhone.

But I guess Nokia is trying to send a message — this is my turf boys. With the announcement of the N97, Nokia has finally come out with a mobile phone that I can really compare with the iPhone and the T-mobile G1.

A quick compare at the specs showed my that it looks like Nokia won — screen 640×360 against the 480×320 of the iPhone and G1. And get this video at 30fps against no video for the iPhone and the T-mobile G1. Autofocus camera is 5 megapixel with FLASH against the measly 2 megapixel of the iPhone and T-Mobile G1 without autofocus nor flash.

Here’s a video demo of the Nokia N97 to whet your appetite.

As an added bonus, the Nokia N97 has FM radio with RDS, Flash Lite 3, Java MIDP 2.0 (giving the owners tons of readily available mobile games and applications).

Nokia didn’t stop there — they put in a whooping 32GB of internal memory, the iPhone only has 16GB. And get this, not satisfied with 32GB, then just stick in another 16GB of external microSD storage.

What’s more the Nokia N97 mobile phone not only has handwriting recognition, a proximity sensor for auto turn-off, accelerometer sensor for auto-rotate but also a full QWERTY keyboard.

And of course it comes with Quad-band GSM, all the three 3G bands, it has HSDPA or 3.5G at a max of 3.6Mbps, GPS and A-GPS, bluetooth, Wifi and EDGE, Nokia Maps 2.0 with touch.

With all the things that Nokia is throwing into this mobile phone, they’ve really blurred the line between a computer and a mobile phone making it worthy of my favorite tagline — “The mobile phone is the computer”.