Admittedly, we had our fair share of panic attacks at Engadget HQ when news spread that Nokia might restrict sales of its E70-2 (a standard-issue E70 with GSM 850 in place of UMTS 2100) to its two American flagship stores in New York and Chicago. Thankfully, those fears have all been laid to rest on news that sales have begun directly off Nokia's US website, offering the trick, S60 3rd Edition QWERTY candybar for a stiff $450 unlocked. Oh, and if you decide to take the plunge, rest easy -- the firmware bungle has been cleared up.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

As we recently reported, Nokia's been dabbling with the whole do-it-yourself firmware upgrade phenomenon as of late. We applaud the effort -- in our opinion, getting the latest and greatest software for your devices should never be any more challenging than connecting a cable to your PC. Murphy's Law being what it is, though, initiatives like this are never going to be without their flaws. Many E70 owners who gave the update process a whirl in the past few days (present company included) were horrified to find that the procedure magically transformed their multi-hundred-dollar bundles of S60 joy into paperweights in just a handful of minutes. It happened to us, and it's not pretty; the phone teases you by turning on and dutifully displaying the "Nokia" logo, but that's as far as she goes. Rumor has it Nokia did the right thing by pulling the offending firmware and quickly replacing it with a new one, but that's little consolation for the folks bidding farewell to their handsets as they get shipped off to Nokia service centers around the world. We're going to give the upgrade another shot with our fresh E70 today and we'll pass on the word if we end up with a second brick -- wish us luck.

Update: We've got good news and bad news. The good news is that we don't have another bricked E70 on our hands. The bad news is that the latest and greatest firmware being offered by Nokia isn't yet available for the US-friendly E70-2 variant (which is what we have). Let's go, Nokia! Americans want faster refresh times when switching to landscape mode just as much as Europeans do!

Besides opening their second flagship store this side of the pond, Nokia had a couple other tricks up their sleeve in preparation for what has turned out to be an exciting weekend for Nokia fanboys of the American persuasion -- namely, the US releases of the E70 and N93. We can personally attest that E70s have been quietly flying off shelves of the Chicago outpost (see picture above) for the past week or so; Nokia's been unable to keep them in stock, in fact, though we don't know whether the release was supposed to have been synched with New York's grand opening today. At any rate, the model being sold is the US-friendly E70-2 variant that swaps out 3G support in favor of a GSM 850 radio, and features a black face that (in our humblest of opinions) looks better than its European counterpart. Meanwhile, the N93 is the same ol' model Europe gets, lacking 850; caveat emptor for peeps with marginal 1900 coverage. Oddly, these handsets are both still listed as "coming soon" on Nokia USA's website, and rumor has it that they may never officially be released here outside the flagship facilities, so book your flights now, folks -- they say the Midwest and the East Coast are nice this time of year.