A mention on Nokia's own interweb not enough to convince you that the North American rendition of the N95 8GB is real? Between the larger display, cool black case, and 8GB of integrated storage, Nokia could end up swiping another several hundred dollars from a decent chunk of original US N95 buyers which we figure is enough convincing for Espoo's bean counters, but it's not good enough for you, eh? How about a major retailer boldly taking orders, then? MobileCityOnline is so convinced that the N95 8GB will get redone with HSDPA 850 / 1900 that it has begun taking preorders with an estimated ship date of February 15, making it a lovely belated Valentine's Day gift – if it actually exists, that is.

So-called Long Term Evolution – GSM's chosen warpath for the next generation of data networks – has been getting its groove on in labs for some time now, so Nokia Siemens decided it was high time to kick things up a notch by taking it out into the wild. The wireless infrastructure joint venture deployed an LTE base station in Berlin on the nascent 2.6GHz band and sent cars equipped with test equipment as far as one kilometer away to check performance, and put simply, the results were good: 173Mbps good, in the best cases. Of course, commercial deployment of LTE is still years away – Nokia Siemens makes a point of listing 2010 as the target right in its press release – but it's good to hear that things are coming along swimmingly, and we're sure Verizon would agreee.