There is a jar next to my Mac, so far with 62 euros, waiting for Nokia to grab it from me somewhere around April. I’m confident that I’ll raise the money for the Nokia N97 – but is Nokia confident that it will be able to separate me from my 550 EUR?

Contrary to Mark’s post on the iPhone Pro killing the N97, I believe that it is only Nokia, who could kill the N97. I mean, if the N97 is not working for you, you can always skip it for the N86 or N900 or the real touchscreen phones from Nokia end of 2009 – start of 2010. With over a dozen S60 phones in one year, there is plenty of choice besides the N97.

5 flagships in one

Yet, the Nokia N97 is not a simple flagship, it is the combination of five:

1. It is an N-Series flagship, with all the hardware goodness of an N9x
2. It is the touchscreen flagship, seriously trumping the 5800 XpressMusic in all departments
3. It will be The Flagship Ovi Device, the first, where the Ovi experience will work out-of-the-box
4. It is timed for the revival of the S60 development community with Qt for S60
5. It is the next N-Gage flagship device

Pretty impressive, huh?

Who could resist the N97

It will contain everything Nokia has and will cover the gaps S60 phones had in the last two years. So, if you get 5 flagships for the price of one, could you still resist buying the N97? There is plenty of time until the 2Q, but here is my 5 point checklist on when not to buy the N97:

1. If it will not have an App Store, where you can buy 3rd party apps and download Nokia software for free (with a minimum of 100 apps)
2. If it will not have Ovi (Nokia) account integrated across all parts of the firmware with single sign on
3. If the battery will not make it through the day with a sample usage of all features (music, video, web, GPS, calls, messaging, N-Gage)
4. If the Ovi Suite will not been ported to Qt and running on Windows, X11 and Mac
5. If all parts of the Ovi web service will not become platform-independent (e.g. Music Store available on Macs, Maps 3 available without plugin)

Piece of cake, right? It is exactly my point – the N97 is an amazing device and a definite buy, but only if Nokia delivers the promise. Check out one of our sponsors, Omio, for availability and mobile phone deals.