It looks like the , Nokia's best attempt yet at an actual iPhone competitor, will be coming to the Middle East sooner, rather than later. I just got an invite to a demo of the N97 in Dubai next week, with some of Nokia's top Middle East management people. They're keeping pretty tight-lipped about a launch date, but the fact that they are even offering a pre-release trial to a newspaper in the region suggests they are approaching launch date. And Juuso Myllyrinne, a marketer at Nokia (at least according to the Finnish Wikipedia) just . I last December. Early impressions, video and more, after the jump. It is a lovely looking handset, with a beautiful high-resolution screen. All put together very nicely, feels good in the hand etc. They are taking media and internet stuff seriously, with some cool web-integration features and a 32 gigabyte hard drive that makes the iPhone seem like a floppy disk. The interface, at least the preview version available back in December at Nokia World, seemed nice, although key parts like the virtual keyboard - which is a huge part of why the iPhone is so awesome - was still not working. This is an expensive little puppy though - we're talking a European retail price in the €550 range (Dh2700), plus the predictable, completely unjustified "UAE Premium" that our darling electronics retailers seem to add on to everything that passes through their stores. I'd guess a local price that won't get you much change out of Dh3200. Target market? People who are willing to pay a premium price for a nice internet browsing, emailing, music playing phone, but for some reason, don't have an iPhone. If anyone knows one of these people - or if you consider yourself to be one - I'd love to understand and study this insanity, so do explain your bizarre logic in the comments. We'll keep you posted when we hear anything more. In the meantime, if you sit through the first minute or so of marketing speak, you get a pretty good look at the N97 in this promo video: