For well over a year, the rumors of a Google phone have been running rampant. After the iPhone made its debut a year and a half ago, hopeful Google-lovers have been fantasizing that the Google phone would address all the shortcomings of the beautiful, but in some ways, limited, Apple smartphone. .........

Nokia (zoom/Itemid,26/page,search/type,quicksearch/sstring,nokia/PageNo,1/) today unveiled the Nokia N97 (phones/nokia/nokia-n97.html) designed for the needs of Internet-savvy consumers. The Nokia N97 combines a large 3.5 touch display with a full QWERTY keyboard. Nokia's flagship Nseries device introduces leading technology - including multiple sensors, memory, processing power and connection speeds - for people to create a personal Internet and share their 'social location.'The Nokia N97 supports up to 48 GB of storage, including 32 GB of on-board memory, expandable with a 16 GB microSD card for music, media and more. This is complemented by excellent music capabilities, full support for the Nokia Music Store and continuous playback time of up to 1.5 days. The Nokia N97 also has a 5-Megapixel camera with high-quality Carl Zeiss optics, 16:9 and DVD quality video capture, and support for services like Share on Ovi for immediate sharing over HSDPA and WLAN. The Nokia N97 is expected to begin shipping in the first half of 2009 at an estimated retail price of EUR 550 before taxes or subsidies.

Nokia (phones/nokia/index.html) today announced that it has completed its offer to acquire Symbian (zoom/Itemid,26/page,search/type,quicksearch/sstring,symbian/PageNo,1/) Limited. All conditions to Nokia's offer to acquire Symbian Limited have been satisfied and it has received valid acceptance of greater than 99.9% of the total Symbian shares that Nokia did not already own. Symbian is the software company that develops and licenses Symbian OS, the market-leading open operating system for mobile devices.