Nokia Lumia 900 goes on pre-order

Retailers have put the Nokia Lumia 900 up for pre-order, with the flagship Windows Phone tipped to start shipping at the end of April.

Both Carphone Warehouse and Phones4U are offering the handset, which was announced at CES in January. An official shipping date is yet to be confirmed, but Nokia told IT Pro the handset should be available "in a matter of weeks".

The price of the device will be comparable to other high-end smartphones, but will be offered for free to users who sign up to a two year, 36 per month contract. This will include an allowance of 300 minutes, 1GB data and unlimited text messages.

The Lumia 900 is set to ship with a 4.3in AMOLED display, 8-megapixel camera and 16GB of internal memory. The handset will be powered by a 1.4GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon APQ8055 processor and have 512MB of RAM.

This specification is not quite up there with high-end Android handsets, such as the HTC One X, which ships with NVDIA Tegra 3 quad-core chipset and 1GB of RAM. So it will be interesting to see if users are willing to splash out.

Nokia has included a 1830mAh pack to help provide all-day usage, and prevent the battery life problems that were associated with the previous model.

The US version of the device is set to include 4G connectivity, but the UK model will be limited to DC-HSPA support.

However, Nokia will be hoping to woo business users with the Windows Phone 7.5 operating system that comes with Mobile Office support. The device also come with a version of Outlook that more closely resembles the desktop version than Android and iOS handsets.

Nokia will also include proprietary apps that were debuted in the Lumia 800. Users will also be able to access Nokia Drive, Maps, and Music for free.