Nokia to offer full range of touch screen phones

By Stuart Corner
Friday, 13 June 2008 05:19

Technology

The senior vice president of Nokia Markets has told Reuters that Nokia will launch touch screen cellphones for every price segment later this year.

Speaking to Reuters just before the launch of the new iPhone, at almost half the price of the first model, Anssi Vanjoki said that Nokia would unveil touchscreen products for all of the handset price segments, rather than just for the higher-end, where its rivals' handsets with touch screens are. "Currently, the market for touchscreen products is a niche market. We always aim for a situation where we can cover all the segments with all the options," he said.

Nokia gave a preview of the product, code named ‘Tube’ in April, generating a flurry of speculation similar but on a much smaller scale than that which preceded both the first and second versions of the iPhone. That initial flurry died down soon after the announcement and this week’s revelations could be an attempt by Nokia to try and stimulate some prelaunch publicity for the product.

Also this week the author of a Nokia Nseries discussion blog posted photos, sourced from Flickr, of a device claimed to be the Nokia 5800 Tube, saying: “it sports a large touch screen which can be used with a finger or stylus, and a 3.2 megapixel (Carl Zeiss Optics) camera with dual LED flash.”

In all likelihood any Nokia touch screen phones will use the Symbian S60 platform on which many Nokia phones are based. A touch screen version was announced in October 2007 . According to the Allaboutsymbian.com website, the touch interface will support both finger and stylus input, has full multi ingual support, has support for tactile feedback (haptics) and is backwardly compatible with the existing S60 platform.

Features identified at the time as giving it an advantage over the first iPhone included: its ability to support qwerty keypad, stylus, or touch screen input, tactile feedback and a web browser integrated with flash video.

Also many manufacturers are licensed to use S60 so there could be a very wide choice of touch screen S60 handsets available. There are claimed to be 100 million S60 devices sold, and thousands of registered S60 applications developers.

When it previewed Tube in April Nokia dismissed the threat posted by the first iPhone saying that it shipped more phones in weekend than iPhone’s, speculated, total sales. The new 3G iPhone with more features, a much lower prices an much wider availability will be a different kettle of fish entirely.