Gadget News

Anyone who likes touchscreen phones should be excited; the most well known brand in the industry has brought out not one, but TWO mobile phones: the sexy Nokia 5800 and the terrifyingly jaw-dropping Nokia N97.

Phase 1 – Nokia’s not-so-brilliant early attempts at a touchscreen phone

Many people seem to be under the incorrect assumption that the Nokia 5800 is the first touchscreen mobile phone Nokia have ever made. It isn’t. The opposite’s true, because there have been several touchy-feely phones released under the Nokia name. Starting with the 7700, we’ve seen a few Nokia mobile phones that are controlled by you pressing directly on the screen. 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 hideous. Just one of those devices, the 6708, displayed a modicum promise, but it was made only for the Chinese market, and so, we never got to play with them in Britain. Unfortunately, that meant that the phones we got were utter, utter garbage.

However, those bad mental images have now been removed by the launch of two new Nokia mobile phones, both of which have touch-sensitive displays, and both of which are much, much sexier…

Nokia 5800 – the magic touch

The first phone on the roster is a completely new member of Nokia’s Xpress range of music mobile phones, the gorgeous Nokia 5800. This phone is very obviously built for music and video; you can tell by the separate XpressMedia touch-key that brings up a list of links to music, videos, the internet, and more. Oh, and the Nokia 5800 has a 3.2 inch touch-sensitive display, to let you use those different media files. Essentially, the Nokia 5800 was created to be a teeny handheld entertainment centre, and as music handsets go, this is just about the sweetest. The Nokia 5800 has also got a 3 megapixel camera, HSDPA internet connection and sat-nav, so that it’s a superb all-round mobile phone, in addition to being a superb media box. Oh, and it’s got a strap to clip on a fake guitar pick. Pointless, but brilliant.

Despite all those features, the Nokia 5800 is very definitely a mid-range device; it isn’t, nor will it ever be, a full-on powerhouse. That role falls to another device…

Nokia N97 – touched by an angel

With the Nokia 5800 all set to deliver touchscreen mobile phones to the mid-range market, that opens up a very big gap at the absolute top-end of the product range; well, there IS a touch-based mobile phone on its way to take its place as the top-end powerhouse: the utterly jaw-dropping Nokia N97. This uses the same Symbian S60 Touch operating system and packages it into the frame of a proper, full-on smartphone. So it has an even more huge, 3.5 inch screen, a slide out QWERTY keypad, and the camera now weighs in at a meaty 5 megapixels. The Nokia N97 is, as should be glaringly obvious, destined to be the new flagship Nseries mobile phone, and it really is as hyper-powered as the rumours had us believe, with HSDPA, sat-nav, digital compass, and integrated Flash, so that you have an internet experience that tops any other mobile phones! Put it like this: the Nokia N97 is awesome. It gleefully relieves itself over other mobile phones and while the Nokia 5800 angles firmly for the mid-range, I reckon that the Nokia N97 will completely DESTROY the competition next year!