Nokia N900 is shipping now, Nokia X6 expected to follow soon

Nokia are getting ready for the holiday season by starting their advance on the smartphone market with two highly anticipated phones - the N900 and the X6. Both the devices are venturing into new territory for Nokia - a new smartphone OS for the N900 and a capacitive touchscreen experience for the X6.

There have been many speculations about the fate of Symbian OS once Maemo gets to smartphones. Nokia says it's here to stay, Internet commentators doubt it. Well, we're about to see them coexist in two separate market segments.

The Nokia N900 is in the "all things to all people" segment - big high-resolution touchscreen and slide-out QWERTY, powerful, highly customizable OS and all-round wireless connectivity. It's certainly the top dog of Nokia's current line-up.

The N900 runs Nokia's Maemo OS, which isn't "Linux-based" like some other OSes - it is Linux, a fork from Debian, actually. This means a lot of much-loved Linux apps will be easily ported to Maemo or it will run things like OpenOffice, AbiWord, Firefox 3.0 and even more, thanks to projects such as Easy Debian.

Well as exciting as it may sound, the hard truth is there is quite limited number of applications available for the latest version of Maemo OS and early adopters may even find it difficult to find basic applications.

But now that it starts shipping as of today, we're sure developers will be hard at work of porting various apps to Nokia N900.

We should not forget as well, that as a consequence of its tablet roots, the Nokia N900 has landscape-only oriented UI. With the exception of the Phone app, everything in N900 runs in landscape mode and at least in this edition of the Maemo OS, there's no way to change that. So Symbian smartphones can rest at ease for now.

The Nokia X6 is the other handset from the Finish manufacturer that is about to go on sale soon - it should hit the stores as soon as this week (12 November) with the actual launch being 16 November.

But even before it's actually available, it attracted a great deal of attention. To build on that popularity and generate even more hype, Nokia is throwing a hell of a party to celebrate iots launch. Next Monday (November 16th) there will be a live concert in London where Rihanna will launch her new album "Rated R". The concert will be live-streamed globally for free to those of you who have registered in advance.

Getting back to the Nokia X6, it runs Symbian S60 5th edition and is the first Nokia phone with a capacitive touchscreen. It targets audiophiles with a pair of serious looking WH-500 headphones and a year of unlimited free music downloads from Nokia's Comes With Music. It can match the spacious 32GB internal memory of the N900, though it doesn't have a microSD port. Still, that's a lot of music, which you get to keep when the one-year period runs out.

For now, we know that the Nokia N900 is headed to T-Mobile USA and that the X6 is up for pre-order as is the N900. Oh, and there are photos of a QWERTY-less Nokia N920 already circulating the Internet.

Source: Reuters