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Recently announced is the first mainstream touchscreen device from Finnish manufacturer Nokia. They’ve made touchscreen mobile phones before, but… nothing like the awesomeness of the new Nokia 5800!

Nokia and touchscreens – lessons from history

Believe it or not, the Nokia 5800 isn’t the first of their mobile phones to feature a touchscreen. That accolade goes all the way back to the Nokia 7700, a mobile phone that, well, never actually got released. But it was still the first, nevertheless. It’s just a shame, really, that Nokia’s first attempt at a touchscreen mobile phone was, frankly, rubbish, since it had a bit of a dodgy interface, the looks… well, the looks were described as anything from ‘a bit misjudged’, to ‘looks like a taco’, all the way up to ‘bad prop from Star Trek’. The follow-up, the Nokia 7710 wasn’t much better, being a bit buggy, still huge, and it lacked the features that other mobile phones were rapidly starting to have (cameras, 3G and so on). After that, the only Nokia devices to have touchscreens were not actually mobile phones, as the concept was shifted over to their range of internet tablets.

But now, touchscreen mobile phones are all set to make a triumphant return to the Nokia range, with their newest and bestest touchscreen mobile phone ever: the Nokia 5800.

Nokia 5800 – touchscreen mobile phones for the masses

Soon to be released, the Nokia 5800 is sure to have a very big effect on their portfolio of mobile phones. And the inspiration of it can be traced back to the release of the iPhone, so you can be absolutely sure they’ve made the Nokia 5800 as slick and as user-friendly as possible. The new S60 Touch interface in the Nokia 5800 is tremendously elegant, as well as being really rather powerful. Put simply, it’s a joy to navigate round, and so much nicer than many other mobile phones on the market. Combine with a list of top-notch features, like 3 megapixel camera, HSDPA and so on, and you get a really cool smartphone. But it’s with music that the Nokia 5800 really shines, as it’s music that this beautiful mobile phone lives for, with a music player that really is second to none. In conclusion, I can sincerely say that the Nokia 5800 is one of the most impressive mobile phones I’ve seen in a long time.

But the surprising thing is… the Nokia 5800 is a mid-range mobile phone, not a top-ender. So what will happen, when the Nokia 5800 magically morphs into the first touchscreen Nseries mobile phone.

Captain N – the future is Nseries

There’s no doubt that the Nokia 5800 is a really cool mobile phone. It’s slick, pretty and clever. but what will the new S60 Touch interface be like when it gets put into Nseries mobile phones? Are we going to see something akin to the Nokia N96 that you control by prodding the screen? Well, the answer, unsurprisingly, is yes, as confirmed by Nokia themselves. The Nokia 5800 is merely the first toe in the water, as it were, and there WILL be Nseries mobile phones released with the new touch interface. That’s when we’re going to see the big, uber-top-end, ultra-powerful mobile phones, with cameras probably in the tens of megapixels, massive amounts of storage, and frighteningly fast internet access. They won’t be the Nokia N96 with a touchscreen, though, for the simple reason that they’ll blow everything away, the Nokia N96 included!

The world of touchscreen mobile phones is starting to get exciting, as the biggest name in the industry has waded in with not one, but TWO mobile phones: the sexy Nokia 5800 and the unbelievably jaw-dropping Nokia N97.

An undistinguished history – Nokia’s early attempts at a touchscreen phone

A lot of people seem to be under the false impression that the Nokia 5800 is the first touchscreen phone to wear the Nokia label. It isn’t. Actually, there’s been several touchy-feely phones to wear the Nokia name. Starting at the 7700, there have been a few Nokia mobile phones which are controlled by touch. They had a relatively big (for the time) touchscreen in common, but the other feature they had in common, unfortunately, was that they were irredeemably awful. Just one of those devices, the 6708, showed a modicum promise, but it was destined only for the Chinese market, and thus, we never got to play with them in the UK. So, we were relegated to handsets that were total, utter toss.

However, those bad recollections have all been exorcised due to the debut of two new Nokia mobile phones, both of which have touch-sensitive displays, and both of which are so much nicer…

Nokia 5800 – if music be the food of love…

First up is a completely new member of Nokia’s Xpress family of music mobile phones, the mouth-watering Nokia 5800. This one’s quite obviously built for music and media, as it has a dedicated XpressMedia touch-key that brings up a list of shortcuts to music, videos, the web, and more. Oh, and the Nokia 5800 has a 3.2 inch touch-sensitive display, to actually play with those different media files. Basically, the Nokia 5800 was created as a little handheld jukebox and movie player, and as music devices go, this is just about the prettiest. The Nokia 5800 also comes with a 3 megapixel camera, HSDPA data access and sat-nav, so that it’s a wonderful all-round mobile phone, on top of being a wonderful media player. Oh, and it’s got a lanyard to attach a fake guitar plectrum. That rocks.

However, the Nokia 5800 is very definitely a mid-range handset; it isn’t, nor will it ever be, an absolute top-ender. That role falls to a separate handset…

Nokia N97 – the single best phone EVER made?

With the Nokia 5800 on track to bring touchscreen mobile phones to the mid-range market, that leaves a very big gap at the absolute top-end, and yes, there IS a touch-based mobile phone waiting to be unleashed to fill that gap: the genuinely jaw-dropping Nokia N97. This uses the same Symbian S60 Touch operating system and packages it into the body of a proper, full-tilt smartphone. So it has a bigger, 3.5 inch screen, a kick out QWERTY keyboard, and the camera now weighs in at a meaty 5 megapixels. The Nokia N97 is, in a very definite way, destined to be the new flagship Nseries mobile phone, and it’s truly as high-spec as the rumours said, with HSDPA, GPS, digital compass, and integrated Flash, so that you have an internet experience like no other mobile phones! Put simply the Nokia N97 is simple incredible. It easily outdoes other mobile phones and while the Nokia 5800 aims to take over the mid-range, I reckon that the Nokia N97 will utterly DESTROY the competition next year!