One of the most awaited smartphones of 2008, Nokia's brand new N96, will be first released in India, ahead of all the other countries that expect the handset's commercial availability.

The Indian division of Nokia has presented the N96 during a recently-held event, saying that Indian users would be able to buy it starting September. The retail price of the new Nseries smartphone will be somewhere around 36,000 INR (828 USD or 526 Euros).

This kind of price undoubtedly makes the N96 out of reach for many mobile users across India. However, if we think about all the features that Nokia has packed into the smartphone, the price is somehow justified.

According to Tech2, the Indian version of N96 will be special, coming with pre-loaded Bollywood content, including: the Om Shanti Om movie (full-length), around 50 music videos and lots of songs in both English and Hindi. The smartphone will have three full N-Gage games as well as the maps of India, Singapore and the UAE.

As for the "normal" features of the new Nseries, these include: a 2.8 inch TFT display with 16 million colors and QVGA resolution, a 5 Megapixel auto focus camera with Carl Zeiss optics, flash and video recording, GSM and HSDPA connectivity, a huge internal memory of 16GB (expandable via a microSD or microSDHC card), GPS, Wi-Fi, full HTML browser, email, Media player with lots of formats supported, a 3.5mm headset jack, FM radio with RDS, TV out and DVB-H TV receiver, Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP and many others.

The N96 runs on Symbian S60 3.2 Edition and comes with a dual-sliding design that unveils an alphanumeric keypad as well as music and video controllers.

Customers in India can pre-book an N96 on Nokia's official website, found at this address. After pre-booking (which requires a 4,000 INR fee), you should be pretty sure that you'll be among the first Indian users to own a Nokia N96 - but only in September, as the handset will not be available before.

The release dates for Nokia N96 in other countries are not officially confirmed for the moment, but the smartphone is said to hit the UK and the rest of Europe starting October. North America will probably get the new Nseries shortly after.