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A month ago, Nokia started taking pre-orders for the North American editions of it N79 and N85 smartphones. The latter handset is now shipping.

Since the N85 is unlocked, you can use it with any GSM carrier. Its high price, $556 on Amazon.com, isn't subsidized, though.

The quad-band GSM smartphone, already available in Europe, now sports the necessary 3G bands (850/1900/2100 MHz) to speedily send and receive data with service from most North American GSM carriers. Notably missing for U.S. consumers is lack of support for T-Mobile's unique brand of 3G. AT&T customers have nothing to worry about, however.

As with the N96,released a couple of months ago and the just announced N97 model, the N85 is designed to maximize use of Nokia's Ovi line of online data services (e.g. games, music, photos, navigation, social networking, etc.).

The N85 sports a dual slider design similar to the N96 and older N95 model, but is smaller than either of those handsets. It has a 2.6-inch, 320 x 240 pixel resolution OLED screen, built-in FM transmitter, 3.5 mm audio jack, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.0, TV-Out and a 5 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics and geotagging capabilities - the latter courtesy of the N85's GPS chip.

Additional features include a 1200 mAh battery and a microSD slot with an 8GB card bundled in the box.

Nokia pre-loads the N85 with at least 10 made-for-mobile N-Gage games, which you can take advantage of through dedicated gaming keys that light up when the device is in landscape gaming mode.

You can learn more about the N85 here and here for full specs.