Nokia unveiled the N97 on Tuesday, a new flagship model with a large touch screen and is Nokia's answer to Sony Ericsson's X1 and HTC's Touch Pro. The Nokia N97 is designed for Internet-savvy people. It comes equipped wity A-GPS sensors and an electronic compass. It makes it easy to update social networks automatically with real-time information, giving people the ability to update their 'status' and share their location as well as related pictures or videos with approved friends. The phone also packs a 3.5" touch display, personalized homescreen and a full QWERTY keyboard.

The Nokia N97 is also suited for browsing the web, streaming Flash videos or playing games. It supports up to 48 GB of storage, including 32 GB of on-board memory, expandable with a 16 GB microSD card for music, media and more. This is complemented by music capabilities, full support for the Nokia Music Store and continuous playback time of up to 1.5 days. The Nokia N97 also has a 5-Megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics, 16:9 and DVD quality video capture, and support for services like Share on Ovi for immediate sharing over HSDPA and WLAN.

The Nokia N97 is expected to begin shipping in the first half of 2009 at an estimated retail price of EUR 550 before taxes or subsidies.

Nokia also annouinced today new Ovi services, including Maps on Ovi and Mail on Ovi.

Maps on Ovi is a free service that allows people to pre-plan their journey at home on their PC and synchronize with their mobile, giving access to pre-planned routes and favorite destinations while on the move.

Mail on Ovi, together with Nokia Messaging which mobilizes consumer email and instant messaging on Nokia devices, brings mobile email to everyone. With Mail on Ovi, users will be able to create and access email online portal as well as on their mobile device. Nokia Messaging, on the other hand, will give consumers access to their existing email and instant messaging accounts from Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Messenger, Windows Live Hotmail, Gmail and Google Talk, and AOL Mail as well as email solutions from thousands of ISPs around the world on the majority of Nokia devices.

The company also announced today that it has completed its offer to acquire Symbian Limited. All conditions to Nokia's offer to acquire Symbian Limited have been satisfied and it has received valid acceptance of greater than 99.9% of the total Symbian shares that Nokia did not already own. Symbian is the software company that develops and licenses Symbian OS for mobile devices.

All Symbian employees are planned to become Nokia employees on February 1, 2009, Nokia said.