Gadget News

The world of touchscreen mobile phones is starting to get exciting, as the most well known brand in the game has waded in with not one, but TWO mobile phones: the sexy Nokia 5800 and the unspeakably awesome Nokia N97.

Off to a bad start – Nokia touchscreen mobile phones in the past

Most people are under the incorrect assumption that the Nokia 5800 is the first touchscreen phone to wear the Nokia label. It isn’t. Actually, there have been several touchy-feely phones released under the Nokia badge. Starting at the 7700, we’ve seen a couple of Nokia mobile phones that work by touch. They all shared pretty big touchscreens, but the other feature they had in common, unfortunately, was that they were irredeemably awful. Only one of these mobile phones, the 6708, showed a modicum potential, but that was destined only for China, and thus, we never got to play with them in Britain. Unfortunately, that meant that the phones we got were utter, utter toss.

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

Nokia 5800 – if music be the food of love…

The first phone up is a brand new member of Nokia’s Xpress family of music mobile phones, the stunning Nokia 5800. This one’s pretty obviously built for music and media, as it has a separate XpressMedia touch-key which brings up a list of shortcuts to music, videos, the internet, and more. Then, of course, the Nokia 5800 has a 3.2 inch touchscreen, to let you muck about with those different media files. Basically, the Nokia 5800 was designed as a teeny portable entertainment centre, and as music handsets go, this is just about the sweetest. The Nokia 5800 also comes with a 3 megapixel camera, HSDPA internet connection and sat-nav, so that it’s a brilliant all-round mobile phone, as well as a superb media gadget. Oh, and it has a strap to attach a fake guitar pick. Pointless, but brilliant.

Despite all those features, the Nokia 5800 is very definitely a mid-range device; it’s not, nor was it ever meant to be, an absolute powerhouse. That role falls to a different mobile…

Nokia N97 – the single best phone EVER made?

With the Nokia 5800 on track to deliver touch-based mobile phones to the mid-range market, that leaves a great big gap at the absolute top-endof the product range; well, there IS a touch-based mobile phone waiting to be unleashed to take its place as the top-end powerhouse: the utterly mind-blowing Nokia N97. This uses the same Symbian S60 Touch operating system and packages it within the shell of a proper, full-on smartphone. So it has a massive, 3.5 inch screen, a kick out QWERTY keypad, 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 powerful as we’d heard from rumours, with HSDPA, GPS, digital compass, and built-in Flash, meaning you get an internet experience like no other mobile phones! Put it like this: the Nokia N97 is simple incredible. It gleefully relieves itself over other mobile phones and while the Nokia 5800 angles firmly for the mid-range, I’m predicting that the Nokia N97 will completely DOMINATE the world in 2009!