Nokia has revealed its latest smartphone, the Nokia N8, packed with features and powered by Symbian ^3, the latest smartphone software.

With the Nokia N8, users can create content, connect to their favourite social networks and enjoy Ovi Store apps and on-demand Web TV programs.

Nokia's new smartphone doubles as a portable entertainment centre where users can make and edit HD-quality videos and enjoy them with Dolby Digital Plus surround sound just by plugging the handset into their home theatre system. The full featured handset also enables access to local and global Web TV services that deliver programs, news and entertainment from channels like CNN, E! Entertainment, Paramount and National Geographic.

The Nokia N8 has a 12 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics, Xenon flash and a large sensor that rivals those found in compact digital cameras.

Social networking is second nature to the Nokia N8. Users can update their status, share location and photos and view live feeds from Facebook and Twitter in a single app directly on the home screen. The Nokia N8 also offers multiple, personalisable homescreens which can be loaded with apps and widgets.

The Nokia N8 comes with free global Ovi Maps walk and drive navigation, guiding people to places and points of interest in more than 70 countries worldwide.

The mobile operating system Symbian ^3 introduces several major advances including support for gestures such as multi touch, flick scrolling and pinch-zoom. The new 2D and 3D graphics architecture in the platform takes full advantage of the Nokia N8’s hardware acceleration to deliver a faster and more responsive user interface. Symbian^3 also raises the bar in performance by delivering greater memory management, allowing more applications to run in parallel for a faster multi-tasking experience.

This is Nokia’s first handset to be integrated with Qt, a software development environment that simplifies the development process, making it possible to build applications once then deploy across Symbian and other software platforms. Nokia has also made available the powerful and simple to use Nokia Qt SDK, in its initial beta, to enable developers to start realising the potential of Qt.

The Nokia N8 is expected to be available in New Zealand in the later part of 2010.