Nokia welcomes another new addition to their family of N-series with the N97, which takes the crown as the crème-de-la-crème of Nokia’s flagship phone model. And on first glance, it seems to resemble a lot of the new phones that have come out in recent memory (cough G1, X1 cough).

We have a full slide-out QWERTY keyboard, tilt touch screen which measures 3.5″, A-GPS, 5MP camera with Carl Zeiss lens, WiFi-Bluetooth combo, and 32GB of on board memory. Pretty standard fare if you ask me and the price tag is expected to be in the $US700 region without plan, which brings it close to the pricing of the G1 which have similar features except the high-end camera. But then again the G1 has Android… while Nokia continues to harp on its own Symbian OS.

There’s not a lot of information available yet, but the touchscreen has to have a pretty beefy processor in order for it to work smoothly. Just ask all the users of underpowered handsets running on WM6.1 what their experience was with the touch screen. The iPhone remains the best touch screen device yet, and whether it will be dethroned by the N97 remains to be seen, although I seriously doubt it.

As with other Nokia phones running Symbian, screen resolution is going to be a problem. With iPhone, HTC Touch HD offering more than twice the screen resolution, the 3.5″ display will look horrible without an advance in this department. Nokia also did not announce whether the new Symbian will be tailored to the screen size of the N97, but expect lots of angry consumers if they didn’t.

But from the looks of the picture, this won’t be an issue. However judgment will be reserved until more details emerge on this phone.