There’s a new touch-screen phone in town, now that Nokia has pulled the wraps off their N97 device, which is due to hit the markets at the end of June, 2009. The gadget, which will be priced at 550 euros ($693) before taxes and subsidies, is fitted with a large touch screen and is aimed at trying to help the company regain lost market share.

Nokia’s new N97 will go head-to-head with Sony Ericsson's X1, HTC's Touch Pro, Apple’s iPhone 3G, T-Mobile’s G1 and Research In Motion’s BlackBerry Storm, although as analysts have stated, by the time the device is released, other rivals would have surfaced.

Nokia introduced N97 on Tuesday, during the Nokia World 2008 conference in Barcelona, Spain, where participants were offered a peak into the device’s features. The latter include slide-out full QWERTY keyboard, the aforementioned 3.5-inch touch screen and a Web browser that supports streaming Flash videos and enables access to several social networking websites. Moreover, N97 brings forth a tool called „social location,” which by using the integrated A-GPS sensors and electronic compass, is able to update users' social networks or to allow them to share their location through photos or videos.

Furthermore, the gadget is compatible with Nokia's Ovi Internet services, including the Nokia Music Store, Nokia Maps and the N-Gage gaming platform. Nevertheless, the latter have not yet been released in the United States.

Other features that N97 puts forward are a music and video player, a 5-megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics and 32GB of onboard memory, with the possibility of expanding it with a 16GB microSD card.