Nokia has announced the upcoming N900 smartphone, a sleek slider powered by Maemo Linux, an operating system typically reserved for tablet PCs. Sporting Maemo 5, the N900 becomes the first full-featured phone to run the OS and takes Nokia away from their typical use of the Symbian OS for smartphone devices.

With an ARM Cortex-A8 processor at 600MHz, 256 MB of RAM and 786 MB of virtual memory alongside 32 GB of storage, the N900 sports a full QWERTY keyboard along with a 3.5 inch WVGA touchscreen, a 5.0 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics and LED flash and an FM transmitter. Other multimedia options include a 3.5mm headphone jack with TV-out functionality, Bluetooth 2.0 and a microSDHC slot supporting capacities up to 16 GB.

Nokia will make the N900 available for sale in October 2009 with an expected price tag of $700 USD.