Two months ago we saw a design mock-up of a funny swivel phone from Nokia, the tension built up when a source showed us a leaked marketing picture. This was proven to be legit at the company’s announcement this morning, and as we were told, the funky device in the early pictures was indeed the Nokia 5700 XpressMusic phone.

What we do know now is that the phone will run a Symbian S60 OS with a revamped music interface; the dedicated audio chip, support for up to 2GB MicroSD cards and the reasonably good 2 megapixels camera would make this a fairly capable mid-range multimedia UMTS phone. Shipment is due in the 2nd quarter this year, suggested retail price is 350Euro or 460USD. –Sam Chan
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UPDATE March 29, 2007: Nokia 5700 3G swivel music phone is for real.

Exactly one month ago we showed you a design mock-up of an unknown XpressMusic swivel device from Nokia, last night we received a better and more official picture of the phone, supposedly to be called the 5700. Now we’re sure that the camera (with LED flash) is indeed on the swivel end, and we would predict that this should run on a s40, and a QVGA screen.

There have been debates whether this phone would turn out to be another S60 FP2 device with a revamped music interface that was not ready at 3GSM, we really doubt that because of the lack of application key over the fixed side, it is extremely unlikely to have the S60-characteristic menu key below the 2 softkeys AND the dial/hang up buttons. Take note that the keypad has 2 sides, one with the usual alphanumeric keys, the other with music buttons as shown on the design mock-up diagram. We’ll keep you updated when we have more news. –Sam Chan

[Thanks Marcel]

It is an open secret that Palm is short of capital and resources, but recently there’s been noise coming out that Palm is in fact actively looking to be acquired, and Nokia is in talks with the company. Palm might be able to increase the momentum of product release, which is actually one of the reasons of the disappointing sales last quarter; in return, Nokia might get more access to the American market let alone the business market, which the E series is not as recognized as the Treo, or RIM Blackberry. There’s also news that Motorola might also be in talks. –Sam Chan

Article [Softpedia]

“Mobiltillverkaren HTC, växer lika snabbt som Sony Ericsson. Bolaget är kund till Ericsson och i en intervju med di.se säger vd:n och grundaren Peter Chou att han gärna pratar samgÃ¥ende med Sony Ericsson” What is that supposed to mean? Yeah we wondered too, apparently the founder and CEO of HTC, Peter Chou expressed his interest in discussing a merger with SonyEricsson at an interview with a Swedish site. In case you don’t know who HTC is, HTC is the company that designed and manufactured your lovely iPAQs, Dell Axims, and almost all of the O2 PDA phones. So are we going to expect orangely funky WM6 products from SEHTC? Hmm, UIQ and WM6 from the same manufacturer doesn’t make too much sense to us. –Sam Chan

Interview [Di.se]