Nokia launched its first touch screen phone today, almost five years after the Finnish company initially expected to enter this segment of the market.
What was rumored in the industry to be called the Tube, is actually designated as the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic. The Symbian-based phone is the first device to run the Series 60 5th Edition user interface, which is the first version of the Nokia UI to include support for touch as well as high resolution nHD (640 x 360) displays. Previous versions of Series 60 supported QVGA (240 x 320) making 5th Edition far more notable than just its support for touch.
Nokia’s practicality surrounds this phone and the strategy behind it. It is not designed to raise bar for touch screen phones, nor is it a high-end, proof of concept device like the Nokia 7710, its first Symbian-based touch screen device developed back in 2003 but never made it to market, and was based on the now defunct Series 90 platform. The 5800 is positioned as a music phone and is intended to ship in volume into the youth market.
Because of its touch screen and focus on music, there will be teeming comparisons to the iPhone in the press, in spite of their different positioning. The 5800, despite its smartphone platform, is intended to sell into the youth segment that is looking for a superior music phone, while the iPhone’s high-end status attracts a more technical savvy consumer. The 5800 also uses a resistive touch screen, not the capacitive touch screen that is used in the iPhone, so there is no possibility of the 5800 offering a multi-touch experience nor is there any threat of patent infringement on Nokia’s part.
There are three main reasons Nokia chose to go resistive rather than capacitive.
First, Symbian and its base of applications were not designed to be navigated by one’s fat fingers. Applications and tight menu structures have historically been activated using a 5-way navigation pad on a snug QVGA display. Even the UIQ touch screen profile that Sony Ericsson has used for years as the interface for its Symbian-based phones is intended to be navigated using a stylus. Nokia also released an SDK today for the new Series 60 profile so that developers can begin to take better advantage of the new touch capabilities.
Second, resistive screens are more than half the cost of capacitive screens. When the strategy calls for high volume of shipments across regions rather than dominating in a niche high-end segment, half the cost has a significant impact.
Third, and the most important reason of all; the force detection capabilities of resistive screens give them the ability to do character recognition from stylus, which is extremely important when entering many Asian markets, most notably China. While American and European markets will likely use the virtual QWERTY keyboard or mini QWERTY keypad, handwriting recognition capability is extremely important in the Chinese market where complex characters are too numerous to fit on a small form factor keyboard. The Asian market is a large part of Nokia’s volume aspirations for the 5800.
As a music phone, the 5800 includes Nokia’s Comes With Music service, which delivers unlimited downloads for one year. Because its retail price of 279 Euros puts it in a bracket higher than the iPhone 3G, users had better understand what “Comes With Music” actually means.
The 5800 XpressMusic will be available in Europe and part of Asia in Q4 2008 and in North America in Q1 2009
