The Nokia N900, codenamed Rover, has been officially launched. The Nokia N900 is as rumoured a 3.5-inch touchscreen with full QWERTY keyboard. The Nokia N900 bears many similarities to Nokia’s leading flagship device, the Nokia N97 but differs in one major way – it runs on the Linux-based Maemo 5 operating system instead of Symbian S60. Check out the full details on the Nokia N900 Maemo…

The Nokia N900 has been officially announced and will be launched in its full glory next week at Nokia World 2009. The Nokia N900 takes everything we knew about Nokia’s previous Internet Tablets and blows them out of the water by delivering a handset that is built for multi-tasking and web-browsing in the same way you would your desktop PC.

Check out the Nokia N900 hands-on

As expected, the Nokia N900 comes with a 3.5-inch resistive touchscreen display and full QWERTY keyboard that sits on a slider hinge. Powered by an ARM Cortex-A8 processor, the Nokia N900 has a memory runtime of up to 1GB and comes with full OpenGL ES 2.0 graphics acceleration, so it can make the most of 3D graphics. What’s more, the Homescreen has a full panaromic display that can be fully personalised with shortcuts, widgets and your favourite apps.

As expected, the Nokia N900 comes with the same great 5-Megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics as found on the Nokia N97. However, we’ve been assured there is a new tag cloud user interface, which allows you to do more with the images once you’ve taken them. This sounds like a great addition and we can’t wait to try it out when we get our hands on the Nokia N900

The Nokia N900 has 32GB of storage and is expandable via the microSD card by a further 16GB. So, 48GB of storage in total, more than enough for even the most tasking of users! Powered by HSPA and fitted with Wi-Fi, you’ll be able to get full internet access no matter where you are. There is also a full Mozila web-browser for the complete online experience.

According to the press release, the Nokia N900 has been ‘designed for computer-grade performance in a compact size, Maemo complements – Nokia’s other software platforms, such as Symbian, which powers Nokia’s smartphones.’ So, it seems Maemo isn’t here to replace Symbian, just to run alongside it. However, who’s to say whether things will change should the new platform prove successful?

As you can imagine, we’re excited about seeing the Nokia N900 in the flesh, as we’re hoping to get our hands on the device when it  makes its official debut at Nokia World 2009, which is now less than a week away. Pricing will be around 500 Euros and the Nokia N900 is expected to ship later this year.

Check out all the official Nokia N900 images: