Nokia announced that its super-mega-hyped N96 smartphone will be available across the UK starting the 1st of October. While this is a bit later than mobile users might have expected, it's still a good thing that the Finnish manufacturer has finally announced an official release date for the new Nseries handset.

According to Pocket-lint, the N96 will be on sale via four British operators (Vodafone, T-Mobile, Orange and 3) as well as via two retailers (Carphone Warehouse and Phones4U). The estimated retail price of N96 was said by Nokia to be of around 550 Euros, hence the UK will probably get it for around 430 GBP. Of course, the four mentioned carriers will also offer the smartphone on contract, hence for much less than 430 GBP.

First unveiled by the Finnish giant back in February, the N96 seems to be the best Nokia handset ever (in terms of features at least). Nokia has packed in the new Nseries smartphone about all the good "things" that users would expect from a high-end mobile device, save for a touch-enabled display.

N96's full list of specs unveils the following: quad-band GSM and dual-band HSDPA connectivity, 16GB of internal memory (expandable up to 24GB), GPS and A-GPS, Wi-Fi, a 5 Megapixel camera (with Carl Zeiss optics, auto focus, flash and video recording), accelerometer, a 2.8 inch TFT display with 16 million colors and 240 x 320 pixels, DVB-H TV, TV out, Music and Video players, a 3.5mm headset jack, FM radio with RDS, Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP, full HTML browser, email, document viewer and so on.

The new Nseries handset runs on Symbian 9.3 S60 3.2 Edition and comes with a battery that can provide up to 3.6 hours of talk-time or up to 220 hours of stand-by time.

At 103 x 55 x 18 millimeters, Nokia N96 can't really be considered a slim handset, but this is the price that the manufacturer had to pay for embedding all those nice features into the smartphone.

There are no details yet on when the N96 will be available in other markets except the UK, but we're guessing that around October the new smartphone will be on sale all across Europe.