Nokia N85 shows its face and bares its teeth

We have been speculating about the Nokia N85 for a while now and finally Nokia has fessed up with an official press release confirming the device’s existence. Billed somewhat exaggeratedly as ‘the latest Nokia Nseries multimedia computer’ the N85 is certainly eye catching.The device follows Nokia’s increasingly homogenized style of the Nseries line with a glossy piano black finish and an eye catching OLED screen. There’s an in-built FM transmitter, 5 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics, 3.5G HSDPA and Wi-Fi, A-GPS and some handy dedicated gaming and music keys (it’s a dual slider like the N96/N96).Still with us? By this point you are probably wondering why this sounds more like a replacement for the N81 than the long awaited successor to the N93 video beast. Well to be honest we don’t have an answer for that but we have to say, as an addition to the Nseries high-end line, the N85 is certainly forward thinking.The device opts for an 8GB microSD card (bundled with every unit) rather than in-built storage and it also includes a free three month license for something called, ‘turn by turn voice navigation’ which sounds to us very much like some sort of clever new GPS function. Even better than that (for big kids like us) the phone comes with an unlock code for any N-Gage game of your choice too.Like we said, forward thinking. The Nokia N85 is expected to begin shipping in October 2008 with an estimated retail price of EUR 450, before taxes and subsidies.

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