Despite discouraging news that Nokia was pulling the plug on its Japanese market, the Finnish handset producer continues to lead the global smartphones market despite having lost significant shares to Apple's iPhone and RIM's BlackBerry.

To combat these powerhouses, Nokia's launched its new flagship smartphone, the N97 today. With a 3.5-inch touch display and full QWERTY keyboard, they've got the potential to lure business users but what really makes the N97 unique is the new "social location" function, which uses A-GPS sensors and an electronic compass to automatically update social networks with real-time information with not only status updates but social location as well.

The N97 supports up to 48GB of storage, including 32GB of on-board memory (expandable with a 16GB microSD card) for music, media and documents and a 16:9 widescreen display is fully personalizable with widgets suited for browsing the web, streaming Flash videos or playing games. Both the physical QWERTY and virtual touch keyboard make for convenient blogging, chatting, texting or emailing. Finally, since no converged device is complete without an internal camera these days, Nokia pulls no punches with a 5.0 megapixel, Carl Zeiss lens and flash equipped, still shot/ video recorder.

Of course all of this innovation doesn't come cheap. Nokia plans to begin moving the N97 in the first part of 2009 for an MSRP of $700

For full specs, click here.