Portable computers are hot hot hot right now, but while mobile phone makers are dying to get into the market, it's hard to get it right. The Nokia Booklet was unveiled in August 2009, but despite having some damn fine features, it never took off. We look at the lessons to be learned from this little finely moulded piece of technology history..

New to Nokia's mid-range X series comes the X3 - a slim, perky consumer phone with a touch screen and a slide-out keyboard. Costing 125 euros (£103) it's likely to be on sale from September.

From the touch screen you can control widgets, the alarm and music for example, and the slide-out keyboard allows for text input.

Music is a big feature on the phone with a built-in FM radio, a music player and access to the significant ovi music store. The Ovi app store is there as well.

There's a 5 megapixel camera with 4X digital zoom that can take both still and video images.

We're quite interested in the unusual shape: a colourful candybar slider, with huge buttons. And check out the dusky metallic shades it comes in.

Nokia X3 will be approx £100, available from September

Nokia fans and hardcore emaillers will be interested in the launch of the Nokia E5, the latest device in the Eseries range.

Described as a sophisticated messaging device - it's built for email on the go. The QWERTY keyboard makes input easy, it can host multiple email accounts, has a lot of applications for instant messaging.

Then there's the the phone of course and a 5 MP camera.

The Features:
- Work and personal email accounts from the homescreen
- Super quick, intuitive set up for email
- Free Ovi Maps - a Sat Nav and pedestrian turn by turn navigator with richly informative TimeOut, Expedia, Michelin, Lonely Planet, Qype and Trip Advisor applications for most countries
- Business-grade security and device management functions such as remote locking with SMS and device and memory card encryption
- Great internet access (HSDPA/HSUPA and WLAN)
- 5 MP camera

See picture gallery below for more snaps.

Available sim-free in Carbon Black or Chalk White, the Nokia E5 is priced at £259 from www.shop.nokia.co.uk

That Blackberry-like top-end Nokia you've been waiting for? It's here. And it costs £289. That's £210 cheaper than the iPhone 4 I hear you say, and you're right. Very right.

The C6 is an email focussed phone and sports a full QWERTY keypad on a horizontal slider. Like the successful N97, it's geared to professional types who want a hard-working easy-to-type-on phone. Nokia-heads will appreciate the familiar interface.

It's a 3.2" screen which they claim is highly responsive (though note it's a resistive screen not a capacitive one so you need to properly click it rather than just touch it). Home page widgets provide access to social networking sites and the home page can be customised with wallpapers, webpage shortcuts and screensavers.

A 5 megapixel digital camera with dual LED flash should make for decent pictures and the Ovi music and app stores come preloaded.

Available in black or white.

Full specs here.

The Nokia C6 is available sim-free for £289 from Nokia
Network deals to be announced shortly

See C6 gallery below:

Okay, this is a putative head to head. We're going to have to take Steve Jobs' word for what the iPhone 4 can do and my experience of the Nokia flagship N8 is based on a play around with a prototype yesterday, but both these phones will be massive so we wanted to line up what we know.

So until we can do a hands-on comparison - here's the iPhone 4 versus the Nokia N8.

Price and status
The iPhone 4 is sitting up near the apex of the smartphone market - at a cough-inducing £499 for the cheapest one, it's top of Apple's range.
The Nokia N8 is the flagship for the Nseries and we're told Nokia's top phone for quarter 3 in the UK, but because Nokia produce so many more phones, for many different markets, it will have a slightly more diluted impact. Price TBC but at a guess I'd say somewhere around £350-400.

Size and shape
Nokia's previous top N-series phone was the chunky rectangular N900 slider, but the N8 is a touchscreen with tapered ends that comes in a range of glowing metallic colours (Dark Grey, Silver White, Green, Blue, Orange). The cases are scratch-proof ionised aluminium and the N8 has a little bulge on the back for the camera kit.
Specs: 12.9 mm thick, 135grams

The iPhone 4 promises to be the slimmest smartphone on the market and comes in Apple's traditional black or white. The metal band around the edge is reminiscent of a Leica camera according to Steve Jobs.
Specs: 9.3mm thick, 137grams.

Camera
This is where the fight gets tough.
The N8 has a very nice camera - a wide-angle Carl Zeiss lens, and flash, two microphones and takes gorgeous 12 megapixel photos and high-definition video.
Both pack onboard video editing software and have instant share with the web features.

Jobs made a big deal of the iPhone's camera - though it's only 5mg pixels, he claims it has been specially adapted to take great films and images.
On balance, seems like a win for the N8 here.

Operating System
Okay, Symbian ^3 is really nice but for user experience Apple wins hands down here.
I know, Apple has only just introduced multitasking, I know, but it does promise to be a silky smooth experience. And that app store is pretty good.
Symbian is very functional but it still has some ugly menus and Options and Back buttons which take up a lot of screen space and are not very intuitive.

The Screen
This is a big battlefield. It will undoubtedly have to be seen to be understood, but Apple's Retina Display technology is marketed as revolutionising screen display. Is it really really that amazing? I don't know.

I do know that the N8 has a lovely very high resolution screen that looked great. The N8 can also be wired up to a television that made much more sense of watching the videos on it. Both have 3.5" screens. The resolution on the N8 was 640x360, on iPhone 4 it is 960-by-640-pixel resolution.

The jury's still out on whether that difference is significant.

Special Features
Nice feature on the N8? It has a mini HDMI out port letting you plug your phone into your widescreen TV and pump HD video content straight to the big screen. Vidoes shot on the N8 camera look great blown up to that size and it sure is easier to see compared with the small 3.5" screen. It also plays back sound in 5.1 Dolby surround quality - pretty lovely.

The iPhone 4's Facetime video chat is billed as the killer feature of this phone, though the Nokia N8 also a front-facing camera which allows for video chat, will be interesting to see how the two measure up.

CONCLUSION
Both phones look good, it's a question of what you prefer. Will the iPhone 4's screen live up to the hype? if it does, it could be the feature that knocks other handsets out of the water.

It's clear top end smartphones are investing heavily in the camera side of their devices - with some stunning top end lenses and video quality in their skinny frames. The N8 seems to have a slight edge here.

And Nokia's open ethos and compatibility with other devices (like your TV) could be the trump card for the device. It's likely it will be available with some Comes With Music deal - and that would be sweet. You could plug your phone into your music system (or anybody's music system) and have any song you ever wanted playing in really high quality surround sound. We like it. On the media front, Apple is bound into iTunes - not exactly everybody's favourite music player.

Still we're looking forward to meeting them both in the flesh...

See more on iPhone here and more on the N8 here

Related: Hands-on with the Nokia N8 - what's new in Symbian ^3
and Hands-On with the Nokia N8 - a quick look at the hardware

The first Nokia phone to pack the Symbian ^3 software, the N8 is a beautiful camera and video device. But what's the user interface like? We had a glimpse of an N8 prototype and played around with it ourselves. Symbian ^3 has some slick features like the album scrolling and they've made it more customisable, but there are a couple of hangovers from the clunky old user interface that I'm not so keen on.

The Nokia N8 with Symbian ^3 will be out in the UK from September, price TBC.

We glimpsed a prototype of Nokia's N8 today. The flagship smartphone takes over from the n900 as the latest in the N-series range and will hit the UK in September.
We take a look at the hardware in the N8 including the uber specced camera (12 megapixels, a wide-angle Carl Zeiss lens and flash) and just why the colour doesn't scrape off the case when you scratch it.

Other nice features include an HDMI-out port, a front facing camera and two microphones. Are you convinced by the need for the bump on the back?