Back in August, Nokia promised a North American version of the N96. Nokia has just announced that it is now available from the Nokia Flagship stores in New York and Chicago, on www.nokiausa.com and various other retailers.
The N96 improves upon its predecessor, the N95, by doubling the internal capacity to 16GB while retaining the SDHC expansion slot, and adding a DVB-H tuner and a 3.5mm headphone jack. On the hardware side, N96 comes with a redesigned dual-slide keyboards with improved layouts for multimedia and gaming, a built-in kickstand, and built-in 3D stereo speakers. It also has quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE and dual-band HSDPA/UMTS connectivity, a 2.8-inch QVGA display, 128MB RAM and 256MB ROM, built-in A-GPS, 802.11b/g Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.0+EDR, a 5MP camera with Carl Zeiss optics, a microSDHC card slot, a stereo FM radio, a 3.5mm stereo headset jack, and TV-out support.
The Nokia N96 can now be preordered from www.nokiausa.com for USD$842.40.