Early this morning, as I lay asleep and my cat was only beginning to think about scratching at my bedroom door to wake me up, Nokia was busy announcing their newest Nseries flagship in Barcelona, Spain.

The N97 is the highest-spec Nokia handset to date, starting with the touchscreen from their 5800 XpressMusic model and adding a slide-out QWERTY keypad, 32GB of internal memory (plus microSD card), fully customizable home screen, a built-in compass (!) and lots more. According to fans of Nokia’s Internet Tablets, the N97 renders that particular line of products pretty much obsolete in one fell swoop.

As expected, the N97 has polarized the rest of teh interwebs. All About Symbian’s verdict is that it’s a worthy contender against the iPhone, Google Phone and BlackBerry Storm, while predictably, our friends to the south don’t agree.

And me? My knee-jerk reaction is a surprising “meh”.

Part of the problem is that Nokia’s new flagship won’t make it to market until mid-2009, and a lot can happen between now and then, especially with nimble handset makers like HTC dropping new products left, right and centre.

Speaking of HTC, this N97 looks very much like a copy of the HTC TyTN II, which has been available for purchase for over a year now. Sure the N97 beats it in every respect, but given that this new Nseries is such a big deal for Nokia I was kind of hoping for a more original form factor, in the same way that the N93 and even the original N95 were in their day.

And then there’s the software and services. Nokia is on the right path with Maps, MOSH and Ovi, but are way behind in making this stuff available to users worldwide — I still can’t get that stupid activation SMS from Nokia so I can start using Ovi Sync!

But what ultimate troubles me is this: Checking off the features of the N97 makes me wonder if the smartphone has become a commodity item. This Nseries flagship seems to have given the Nokia faithful everything they asked for, but not much more. It’s great that what was the stuff of dreams only a few years ago is now readily available from multiple manufacturers, but I would hate to see the design of these pocket computers become stagnant — if it did, I fear that the golden age of smartphones would have come to an end.

And while you ponder that, here’s some N97 pr0n for you courtesy of Engadget…