Nokia finally made the N93 widely available in the U.S. through its American Web site last month. Before that you could only buy the smartphone at the Finnish phone maker's two Flagship stores in this country - located in Chicago and New York City.

According to one report, the N93 firmware upgrade even adds a language pack for U.S. english, a welcome change of pace for those who prefer American-style word usage over the UK version bundled as a default with the smartphone.

The upgrade is also supposed to improve the way the N93 handles memory (leaving more RAM free to the user), enhance the camera application, fix a number of SMS related bugs, and more. Click here for more details.

To update the N93's ROM select the model name from the online menu, whereupon you'll see that you can only obtain the firmware through a PC and not an over-the-air download, as with some other smartphones. Make sure you follow Nokia's directions closely and back everything up on your smartphone first.

More on N93
Nokia's sells an unlocked version of the N93 for $700 in the U.S. It runs on the Symbian 9.1 and S60 3rd Edition platforms, and has the same twist and shoot form factor as the earlier N90 model.

The N93 weighs 6.35 ounces and measures 4.65 x 2.19 x 1.11 inches. It is a tri-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE (900/1800/1900 MHz) smartphone with a 3.2 megapixel Carl Zeiss lens for video that offers 3x zoom at 30 frames per second and stereo audio recording plus digital stabilization.

It also has a flash and an active camera toolbar to display all available capture features, from exposure value to color tones and white balance. There are dedicated keys for shutter, zoom and flash and also a camera mode key that enables you to switch quickly between image and video capture as well.

While the N93 integrates 50 MB of memory, its miniSD card slot enables users to add up to 2 GB more storage for up to - Nokia asserts - 90 minutes of DVD-quality video or close to 2500 high-quality photos.

Additional specifications include a 2.4-inch QVGA display that supports up to 262,144 colors and a wide 160 degree viewing angle. There's also 802.11b/g Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.0, a digital music player, FM radio with visual radio, Universal Plug and Play, and TV-out.

The 1100 mAh lithium-ion battery is supposed to get 5.1 hours talk and 10 days standby time on a single charge.

Blog Symbian Freek lists the following enhancements in the N93's firmware upgrade:

Out of Memory
Camera buffer changes for more free RAM
24.7MB free RAM after boot-up (18.8MB in PR1)
Out of Memory framework threshold changes

Camera
Change default setting of Optical zoom for video to off
Camera application freezes in low memory situation
Fixes for a few potential crash in camera application

Other SMS freeze
Uncompressed bitmap taken into use and WServ fix
SMS sending delay, hangs fixed
Call crashes fixed
Probability reduced by having uncompressed bitmap/wserv/RAM changes

Operator/Region relates changes.
Does not read voice mail number from Cingular USIM