The next Nseries flagship, Nokia N96, was first announced at the MWC 2008, in February 2008, and if the current rumors turn out to be true, the phone will hit the market in August. Carphone Warehouse, a leading European Mobile phone retailer, lists Nokia N96 on its UK website with the mention "Expected: August 2008", so we can hope that until the end of this summer the high-end device will be commercially available.

Well, if the N96 indeed comes in August in the UK, we assume the whole Europe will get the handset at about the same time, as there shouldn't be a significant difference between the release dates. As for North America, Asia and the rest of the world, Nokia will most probably release the long-awaited phone a bit later than in Europe, since it has always done this way with the important handsets.

If you don't know yet what Nokia N96 has to offer, we can tell you that it's a worthy successor of the N95 model, it measures 103 x 55 x 18 millimeters, weighs 125 grams and comes with a dual-slide design. N96 has an impressive 16GB of built-in memory that will allow users to store about anything they ever wanted to have on their mobile phone, including up to 40 hours of video content or more than 3000 songs in MP3 format. Even more, the handset comes with microSD card support, meaning you can get an extended storage space of up to 32 GB.

Furthermore, the handset packs a 2.8 inch TFT display (16 million colors, 240 x 320 pixels) and a 5 Megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics, flash, auto focus and video recording (VGA at 30fps), so we should expect a photo quality at least as good as the one offered by the cameras of N95 or N82. Other notable features of N96 include quad-band GSM and dual-band HSDPA connectivity, Wi-Fi, DVB-H TV broadcast receiver, video and music players with many formats supported, GPS and cutting-edge Internet capabilities.

Nokia N96 (with all the above mentioned features) will come for an estimated retail price of about 550 Euros ($850), and all we can do now is wait for an official confirmation regarding the August release date.