The highly-anticipated Nokia N97 smartphone is reported to come to the market starting March 31st this year. The handset has been spotted at the online retailer Play.com, where it is listed for pre-order and is stated to become available on the aforementioned date. The phone on the retailer's site features a price tag of £479.99, which translates into about $707.

The N97 was announced by the company at Nokia World, late last year in Barcelona, and it would be the second touchscreen S60-based smartphone released on the market by the Finnish mobile phone maker.

From what we've seen on the listing page, the device is rich featured. It comes with a 3.5-inch TFT touchscreen display, which delivers a 640 x 360 pixel screen resolution and 16 million colors, and it also packs a 5 Megapixel camera that sports auto focus along with Carl Zeiss optics and dual LED flash. Besides the massive touchscreen, the upcoming Nokia N97 also includes a slide-out full QWERTY keyboard.

The feature list of the handset also includes 32 GB of internal memory, complemented by a microSD card slot that has support for up to 16GB of external memory, a 3.5 mm audio output jack, multimedia player with support for MP3 / WMA / WAV / eAAC+ file formats, digital compass, accelerometer sensor for auto-rotate, handwriting recognition and Nokia Maps 2.0 Touch. The phone supports quad-band GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900 and includes GPRS and EDGE, HSDPA connectivity and internal GPS, as well as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity support.

Nokia has already announced the handset as coming towards users in the first half of the year, which places the 31st of March within the expected time frame. The N97 model listed on Play.com is only a European variant, which will come with support for the European 3G frequencies.