The iPhone has been a phenomenon sorts in the mobile phone industry. It has forced each and every major handset manufacturer to go back to their design boards and make new designs. Nokia, the pioneer in non-touch screen based handsets too has felt the heat. With the future evidently being in touch based smart phones, Nokia has, for the past couple of months been involved in developing a touch based UI for its series60 smart phones. The latest leaked pictures of Nokia’s concept touch-screen phone codenamed “Tube” have confirmed the rumors that Nokia too is working on such a device.
The pictures show a full touch-screen based device, without any hardware keypad and approximately 3 to 3.5 inch wide screen. The device is said to be one of the initial low-end models in the touch-screen configuration and the company would soon be launch higher-end models in touch configuration. As visible from the icons and the display of the leaked pictures, it seems that Nokia is still in favor of QVGA resolution in mobile phones. It’s really strange that when after equipping the phone with such a big screen, it is setting such a low resolution, which makes icons and graphics look pixilated just like in case of N95-8GB version, which comes in similar low resolution and big 2.8 inches screen. It is confirmed by Nokia that the touch-based device would not be included in NSeries. In addition, one of the major drawbacks in only touch-based mobiles has been difficulty in typing through virtual keyboard, so it does not seem to be a great idea in just going for an on-screen keyboard and handwriting recognition, when most of the manufacturers are opting for slide out keyboards, the concept pioneered by HTC.
The handset is expected to be loaded with all the communication modes like quad band, global 3G, HSDPA 7.2Mbps, WLAN and uPnP. Bluetooth will be also available with A2DP profile as well as AVRCP, which allows you to use Bluetooth stereo headset as remote control for controlling the media player in phone. The GPS and other features like N-gage gaming application would be standard. Being a touch input based mobile, the phone would have stylus as its mode of inputting text, which now seems like so obsolete. The decision of putting small icons and putting a stylus for UI seems to be a design mantra, which has become obsolete. With the multi touch and finger swipe interfaces becoming popular with iPhone and HTC’s touch, Nokia should rather rethink about this whole stylus thing. With Sony Ericsson’s Xperia X1 set to launch in a couple of months, the market of touch interface based mobile phones is going to get more hot.
The phone would be equipped with at least 3.2-mega pixel camera with the higher 5megapixel sensor reserved for a enhanced and hi-end version to be released later on. Tentatively, the handset would be announced in later half of this year and to be put in market by Q1 next year. It is going to be a little late in the touch screen revolution as the new iPhone is again going to raise the bar with set of new features and with the release of Apple’s SDK for iPhone is surely going to promise a lot more applications which previously were not possible on iPhone.
