Nokia to launch Linux-powered N900 tomorrow

The N900 will be Nokia’s first and last Maemo 5 smartphone, with the next version due to run the new MeeGo Linux mobile OS created as a joint venture between Nokia and Intel.

It’s a case of “hello, goodbye” for Nokia’s N900 smartphone, which will make its Australian debut tomorrow at Nokia’s first developer conference in Sydney.

The smartphone’s launch at the Forum Nokia Developer Conference  – a free event where content providers and developers can swot up on mobile applications and services aimed at the Nokia platform – will precede its actual on-sale availability in early April, although the local price has still not been announced.

The N900 partners a 3.5 inch resistive touchscreen panel with a slide-out QWERTY keypad. The meaty powerplant is an ARM Cortex-A8  processor with OpenGL ES 2.0 graphics acceleration, 32GB of storage and full support for Adobe Flash and AJAX.

For such a serve of on-the-go goodness, the N900 also represents the first and last outing for Nokia’s Linux-based Maemo 5 OS.

During last month’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Nokia announced it had scrapped Maemo and would merge the OS with Intel’s Moblin operating system to create a single open-source OS named MeeGo.

An initial MeeGo 1.0 release is due by mid-year, after which Nokia will ship its first MeeGo products. Nokia mobile phones supremo Kai Oistamo described the N900 as “the direction we see for the MeeGo platform on Nokia devices”, saying that “the wave after the N900 is the Meego wave”.