Nokia, announced today the company’s first Linux based phone, the N900. While leaks and rumors of this product were being circulated from since a few months ago, the official unvieling seems to have most tech-bloggers, geeks and Linux enthusiasts highly impressed.

The phone is based on a Linux Mobile Software platform called Maemo. Maemo was one of the popular open source mobile software stacks covered in a previous article.

With Nokia embracing the newly released Maemo 5 Linux based mobile platform for one of it’s most expensive and highly awaited “iPhone killer” products, albiet the fact that thier own Symbian OS has also been a winner among mobile phone OSes, clearly indicates the dominance of Linux as the next generation platform for Mobile devices.Nokia has a great website for showing off N900 as well as Maemo’s prowess.

N900

Nokia's Linux Phone -N900

The new device has quite a lot of impressive features like a powerful OMAP processor with OpenGL ES 2.0 support, 1 GB of Application RAM, widescreen touch display, QWERTY keyboard, 5 MP camera, GPS and Quad-band GSM, EDGE, GPRS and WCDMA support, on the hardware side.

On the software side Maemo 5 has a lot of amazing features like the Mozilla engine based browser, a complete suite of open source applications for Media playback , support for Adobe Flash 9.4, multiple desktops , Widgets and an Application manager. Another cool thing about Maemo 5 on the N900 is it’s support for multi-tasking which is sure to show an enhanced performance, possibly even better than the iPhone.


Introducing Maemo 5 from Maemo on Vimeo.

All in all, this one does seem likea device that could give others like the Android-based HTCs or Webkit based Palm Pre’s a good run for their money. However, literally speaking, currently speculated to be at a price range of  $700, it is a bit pricey and by the time it is available in India, it will still be about the Rs.32,000/-plus category.

What are your views on N900 ? Will it be in competition against the iPhone ? Or will it dominate the Linux-based Mobile phone market only ?