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Nokia's first smartphone to not run on the Symbian OS, the N900, won't ship this month, as expected. Instead, according to the company's Head of Maemo Marketing, Peter Schneider, the device won't become available until the middle of November. He did give the reason for the change in plans. .

The N900 looks a lot like Nokia's previous Wi-Fi tablets—the N810, N800, and N77. The latter, the first model in the series, shipped way back in the fall of 2005. It runs on the latest version of Nokia's open source Maemo 5 Linux platform.

The N900 sports a WVGA touch display with a slide-out keyboard, a 5 megapixel camera with (as is Nokia's usual practice) a Carl Zeiss lens, 32GB of internal memory, Bluetooth, and a microSD slot to expand storage capacity to as much as 48GB.

It uses a ARM Cortex-A8 processor and includes up to 1GB of application memory and OpenGL ES 2.0 graphics acceleration.

The new tablet has a Mozilla-based browser and features full Adobe Flash 9.4 support. Flash is the most widely used platform for videos and animations on the Internet. Also, Maemo software updates occur automatically over the Web.

Nokia Messaging service supports up to ten e-mail accounts. Text message or IM exchanges with friends are shown in one view and all conversations are organized as separate windows.

Nokia says the N900 will go for EUR 500, excluding sales taxes and subsidies. It will be made available in the U.S. as an unlocked phone for $650. Rumor has it T-Mobile USA may offer the smartphone here officially, with, one would hope, a substantial subsidy to reduce the price.

See video below for a brief overview of the N900 and Maemo 5.

[via maemo.org]