“Now you can carry your clique with you in your pocket.” That is the line that opens Nokia and AT&T’s press releases with regards to the announcement of the The Handset Formerly Known as Mako. As you might imagine from the tone of this opening sentence, this puppy has tween written all over it. Earlier this month we learned that the S60-powered Nokia Surge 6790 would launch in the mid-July time frame and sure enough, here we are. We gave you some exclusive hands on goodness a month and a half ago but just in case your interest wasn’t completely diminished at that point in time, here are the highlights from the release:

• 2.0 megapixel camera – Customers can capture quality photos with color camera and 4X digital zoom
• AT&T Navigator – AT&T Navigator provides audible turn-by-turn directions, monitors traffic and alerts users when there is a slowdown or incident
• AT&T Mobile Music – Customers can listen and download their favorite music from Napster Mobile, eMusic Mobile, XM Radio and more over the air
• AT&T Video Share – The first-ever service in the U.S. that allows users to share live video over wireless devices while participating in a voice call
• JuiceCaster – Customers can share videos and pictures from their wireless device to the Web’s most popular sites including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr

The Nokia Surge will be available online and in stores starting this Sunday, July 19th, for $79.99 after mail-in rebate on a 2-year contract. The line forms to the left.

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A Qik video posted to YouTube shows off the many sides of the Nokia 6790 Surge, codenamed Mako, headed soon to AT&T. The unusually shaped handset has already been spec’d and exclusively photographed in detail of course, so the only real takeaway beyond the release name of the handset is the fact that it will allegedly drop around the middle of this month. The author of the video also claims the Surge will be well-priced, though he notes that pricing details are not yet finalized. Hit the jump if you just can’t resist checking out this little budget messaging machine on video.

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So check it… We just got our hands on Nokia’s 6790 (codenamed Mako) device — the freaky 3G sliding QWERTY headed for AT&T. There have been no live pictures of this bad boy so we went ahead and took a bunch. The phone itself is drastically different from what we’d expect from Nokia (just based on their design heritage) yet ridiculously lackluster. While most of you (us included) thought this would be a high-end device, our quick perusal  dictates otherwise. It feels like it would fit right in with the Samsung Propels, LG Xenons and Pantec Matrixs of the world. That’s not to say this is anything final, the unit we have is obviously not a retail unit nor is the software it’s running finished either, but these are just the first impressions we’re getting.

The screen is pretty low-res and low quality as well. We’re not feeling the keyboard (the fact Nokia still doesn’t move the letter Z one space over is hilarious) and the unit itself screams low-end to be perfectly honest. Kind of a let down. Check out our photos of this mythical beast in our gallery, leave us any questions in the comments, and stay tuned for a review of this unit pretty soon!

Click on over to our Nokia 6790 Mako Hands On gallery!

Well, what do we have here? Apparently the Symbian OS won’t be left out of the fray this year with AT&T as a previously unknown S60 handset has been revealed in the same deck we reported earlier. The Nokia Mako, pictured in the top left, is a Symbian S60 3.2-powered device unlike anything we’ve seen from Nokia thus far. This side slider will feature a 2.6-inch QVGA screen, four row QWERTY keyboard, quad-band GSM (850/900/1800/1900MHz), dual-band HSDPA (850/1900MHz), 2 megapixel camera, aGPS, Bluetooth 2.0, 128MB of on-board memory, microSD expansion and a 2.5mm headset jack. That is apparently all the love S60 will be getting at AT&T this year but hit the jump for details on three mid and entry-level offerings from Nokia headed our way.

The remaining three handsets, the Thresher, Grouper and Snapper, share the same S40-based UI. They also share designs that were seemingly recycled from Motorolas of old. The Thresher is a standard slider with quad-band GSM, tri-band HSDPA, 3.2 megapixel camera, aGPS, Bluetooth 2.1, built-in compass, 140MB of on-board memory, microSD expansion and a 2.5mm headset jack. The Grouper is a flip phone that shares the tri-band HSDPA, aGPS and Bluetooth of the Thresher but drops the camera down to 2.0 megapixels, loses the compass, and lowers the on-board memory to 70MB. For those die hard PTTer’s out there, the Grouper also includes Kodiak PTT 5.2 support. Lastly, is Nokia’s more entry-level offering the Snapper. The Snapper is a flip phone with quad-band GSM, tri-band HSDPA, 2 megapixel camera, Bluetooth 2.1, AGPS, up to 70MB of on-board memory, microSD expansion, 2 megapixel camera and Kodiak PTT.

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