Contrary to the saying suggesting that all good things come to those who wait, Nokia's N96 uber device has started shipping almost a month earlier than planned.
The IT industry is littered with products that arrive after all the other products have left the party, but Nokia has bucked the trend with the new multimedia handset.
Back in July, Nokia confirmed that the UK release date of the much-anticipated handset would be 1 October, but the mobile giant today confirmed its general availability.
"The Nokia N96 is mobile entertainment at its best, a fitting flagship for our Nseries range. It defines convergence by blending phone and multimedia options seamlessly with the unique Nokia Nseries dual slider that makes discovering and sharing experiences easy," said Jonas Geust, vice president of Nokia's Nseries arm.
"Watch live TV and video, take high quality photos and geotag them to specific locations or directly upload them online via the fast internet connection - it is all about taking mobile entertainment and communication to the next level."
With live TV features thanks to DVB-H technology, a five megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics, and a bigger-than-you-average-phone 16GB of internal memory and the ability to increase that to 24GB with microSD card business and consumer users alike are likely to find a soft spot for the device.
It'll retail at 550 before taxes and subsidies.
IT PRO's sister title iGIZMO featured a preview of the device and we'll bring you a more in-depth review of what's hot and what's not about the N96 it as soon as we can.
