Nokia's 'hero' phone trapped in phone booth

The phone that Nokia described as its "hero product for Q1" has got its Superman knickers in a twist.

According to Nokia, the N95 won't be available in the US until Q2 2007, this official N series comparison page reveals. Nokia had touted the N95 as a Q1 product when it unveiled the slider in the summer. The N95 packs in a five megapixel camera, GPS, and the new high speed version of 3G, HSDPA.

Slippages are not unusual with high-end smart phones - and delays to this model may have been expected, given its feature set. On its announcement in September, Nokia initially passed around design prototypes without a battery - leaving hacks to admire the case, but not much else.

Nokia's N series, like Sony Ericsson's UIQ models, builds on a radically different architecture based on Symbian's real-time kernel. This year's N series models were originally slated for a spring launch, but didn't arrive in quantity until the autumn. Sony Ericsson has suffered the most with delays, however, and eventually bought Symbian's UIQ division to try and speed up development.

The slippage was spotted by PDA site Brighthand. ®

Bootnote Readers question whether since this is a US-page, it's fair to call this a "slippage". Writes Chris: "I presume you've also noticed that the official comparison page also has the N91 and N93 listed as 'coming soon'? This is fantastic news. Especially as I've been using the N91 perfectly happily for the last 4 months. Going from widely available on the high street to 'coming soon' is even more serious slippage than being put back a quarter, wouldn't you agree?"

Indeed.