Nokia has launched the long-rumored touch phone, aka the Tube, and it is the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic. The 5800 is a touch-only phone with a focus on multimedia playing, no doubt to prevent inevitable iPhone comparisons. The handset maker also rolls out their Comes With Music service, a music store that coupled with multimedia phones by Nokia provide a one year access to all the music downloads you want for free. You get to keep everything you download too so this is a pioneering move on Nokia’s part.
The 5800 phone will not be compared to the iPhone as it’s a lot clunkier and boring for sure. It has a 640×360 screen that is nice and bright and all touch screen. It’s a resistive touch screen though, so it’s sure to not work as well as that on the iPhone. That’s likely the reason Nokia includes that shark’s fin stylus in the photo above as you’ll probably need to use it a lot. The screen provides haptic feedback when touched like many phones and it is all powered by the new version of the OS, S60 Fifth Edition.
The 5800 XpressMusic is not breaking much new ground, it’s rather like a high-end feature phone with touch. The real news here is the Comes With Music package bundle. Buy the 5800, get a one year subscription to the all you can eat music store. You get to keep all downloaded music even without renewing the subscription making it pretty innovative. Note that according to Nokia music can only be downloaded to the phone so you’ll be restricted by the amount of storage available on the phone for that year. You can only burn the music to CD for safekeeping by another paid subscription plan.
The Symbian browser has been updated to work better with touch and videos I’ve seen of it in action it looks pretty good. It won’t unseat Mobile Safari yet but it’s better than prior versions of the browser.
Note that currently Nokia is not saying when the 5800 will be available outside Europe. They have stated that it will be available in Western European markets in Q1 2009. They also plan a version of the music store for the US market but cannot say when that will happen. It is expected the 5800 and music store will not be available in the US until sometime next year.
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