Nokia has been trying to kill the iPhone for a while now. N95 was an early attempt by Nokia to beat the iPhone in the smart-phone game. The device was certainly powerful, and it did gather momentum in Europe, but iPhone had more momentum in the U.S. and flaws such as poor battery life doomed N95. Since then, Nokia has been coming up with better, more powerful phones on a consistent basis and none have managed to establish themselves as an iPhone killer. So if you are Nokia and want to keep dominating the smart-phone market, what would you do? You change your strategy. Nokia N900 is a new digital powerhouse that is designed to take on the iPhone in more areas than one.

Nokia N900 uses a flavor of Linux operating system to give you a PC like experience on your smart-phone. It also comes with 32 GB on board storage and 1 GB of app memory. But more importantly it comes with a 5 MP video camera that you can use to take killer still photos and clear videos on the go. Here are a few other features that you get with N900:

• Sliding QWERTY: awesome for texting.
• Memory Expansion (SD): up to 48 GB
• GPS: just like most top phones on the market.
• TV out: watch your videos on your TV with a Nokia cable.
• VOIP: you can now make VOIP phone calls right from your phone.

There are plenty of other things to be excited about with this phone (see the full specifications here). Watch the video after the break for a quick preview.

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We have all heard it before: how no phone on the market can even get close to challenging iPhone in the smart phone market. iPhone is more than just a piece of hardware. The platform that Apple has built around it and the power of the community behind it has made iPhone a tough nut to crack for Palm, Nokia, and other companies that have tried to “kill iPhone.” The problem that many of these iPhone challengers have had is they do not come up with many original, game changing ideas. That makes it extremely difficult to compete against iPhone. Add to that the fact that you are not competing just against the hardware, and you’ve got a mountain to climb. A very steep one.

Google may be the only company that is capable of coming up with a game changing solution for the mobile market, but it is not interested in developing its own phone. Microsoft has been rumored to be interested in taking another shot at Apple, but Microsoft is a follower and not such a good innovator these days. Palm Pre is certainly a capable phone and a worthy challenger, but it falls short as it does not pull everything together as well as iPhone does. So is there any hope for these companies to kill the iPhone?

There is hope, and that hope comes from a partnership that has been the only Achilles’ heel for Apple iPhone. I have always believed that the exclusive partnership with AT&T was a good short-term idea, but not working with other carriers has kept iPhone back a bit. It’s not as if AT&T provides an out-of-this-world service to its customers. And everyday we hear about yet another problem with AT&T service. AT&T has tried to make the iPhone even more tempting by lowering its wireless service prices and make it easier for folks to upgrade to iPhone, but painful shortcomings still remain. Apple may be dedicated to keep innovating, but as long as AT&T is the one and only carrier (in the U.S.), iPhone challengers can dream. It still won’t be easy to topple iPhone.

Nokia doesn’t seem to want to give up on the whole iPhone challenge thing. Now they have come full force ahead with XpressMucic 5800 to challenge the supremacy of Apple iPhone. This time Nokia is also challenging the iTunes by offering its own music service that provides customers with thousands of music songs every month.

I do like this phone a lot on the paper. But Nokia has tried and failed numerous times in its attempts to kill the iPhone. Now they are trying to do it by using a touchscreen phone. I don’t think anything major going to come out of this whole story. The market is simply not the same as it was a year ago with the introduction fo Google phone. Nokia is literally faced with a two-headed monster in the smartphone market.

While it is known that June 9th will be the day that iPhone 2.0 will be released, there are several so-called iPhone killers that will be released around the same time. Of course, we all know that nothing these other guys have come up with so far has managed to properly challenge the iPhone. But Sprint believes that their “Instinct” will put up a good challenge against the iPhone. But here is why it will not:

1. It looks pretty much like an iPhone copycat. It surely has some nice features but Apple is a brilliant marketing company. So even if Instinct was better than the iPhone, which is not by the way, it would still struggle to get attention when the iPhone 2.0 is released.
2. Sprint is not exactly the best service provider out there. So despite them claiming that people should jump on this soon before it’s gone, I believe people would rather wait a few weeks for the iPhone than Instinct.
3. You can’t kill an iPhone with an iPhone lite, now can you? Most cell companies are struggling to really come up with any original ideas and that’s what’s hurting them. In my mind that will continue for the foreseeable future.