The flagship Nokia phone, which the Finnish giant makes big bets on, is rumored to appear on store shelves on August 24. In any case, the German department of Amazon already takes pre-orders for purchase of the new smartphone.

The official release date has been fixed by Nokia itself within the summer months. It is still unclear whether the matter concerns the global launch or the company will initially focus on European markets as before. The estimated retail price varies between 460-590 dollars.

The main technical features of the smartphone Nokia N8 include the latest Symbian ^ 3 operating platform, a 3.5-inch touch screen with a resolution of 640×360 pixels, a 12 megapixel photo-video camera with xenon flash, 16-GB of internal flash memory and slot for microSD-cards.

In tests of the prototype of N8 with Speedy Go benchmark that checks video graphics performance is shown that the new device is 54% faster than Samsung Omnia HD and 180% faster than Nokia N97. This is due to the fact that, despite the presence of hardware accelerator in all three phones, only Symbian ^ 3 has access to it.

The Taiwanese resource Commercial Times claims that Nokia is developing an inexpensive smartphone based on Maemo platform. The very first and still the only device using the possibilities of Maemo 5 is Nokia N900. The new device will be much bigger but regardless to this fact much cheaper.

According to the data available, the phone will be based on Qualcomm processor of 7000 series (N900 uses a faster ARM Cortex-A8 with a frequency of 600 MHz). The diagonal of the touch screen will be increased from 3.5” to 4”. There will probably be no sliding QWERTY-keyboard.

The assembling of the touch phone will be entrusted to Compal company. The start of deliveries is scheduled for the second half of 2011. The prime cost of Maemo-device will be $150.

It should be noted that these rumors are from the point of view of the latest news – at the beginning of the year Intel and Nokia announced the creation of MeeGo platform, which will be based on operating time of Maemo and Moblin.

Nokia encourages to improve the environment through the use of mobile phones for Internet surfing.

The below video clip is a great sample. If you update the status on Facebook via your computer, the same amount of energy will be spent that is spent to replace 100 statuses with a mobile phone.

To make users more kind to the Earth, Nokia team will submit videos showing the simplicity of how to get “green” for the next few weeks. These videos will show us how the use of our mobile phones can help to protect the environment from the harmful effects of CO2.

The first story, as mentioned just above, is about the Internet surfing. With the help of a mobile phone in any place and at any time you can roam the expanses of the Internet, read e-mails and spend much less power than the implementation of the same actions on your PC. And if Nokia phone users now use the Internet on their devices, the impacts on CO2 emissions will be impressive.