Nokia To Finally Embrace Touch?
We believe that the touch interface is going to be a dominant technology in the mobile world for some time to come. It turns out Nokia may be catching on to this mentality as well.
Nokia fans have had only one touch enabled mobile handset come out in recent months – the Nokia XpressMusic 5800. In June, the Finnish handset giant is posed to deliver the Nokia N97, a device that is a feature monster, packing a touch screen and full QWERTY keyboard for data entry.
To add to this Nokia touch fever, a few poignant publications have noted that sources inside Nokia are reporting a threesome of ‘thin touchscreen phones’ set to debut later this year. The new phones are said to feature the VibeTonz technology that Nokia licensed from Immersion, which takes haptic feedback technology to the next level by delivering a “multi-sensory experience”.
I’m not sure what to expect from a VibeTonz-enabled hands yet. However, after experiencing how Apple’s iPhone and application developers are utilizing touch on the Apple platform, I’m anxious to see what Nokia can deliver if and when they put their creative and engineering muscle into delivering a touch-enabled device.
A chief complaint amongst touchscreen phone users (and a major barrier for buying them) is the lack of tactile feedback while typing. Perhaps with Immersion’s haptic technology, Nokia can win over those who have held out on buying a touch device to date.
What is your opinion? Can you type adequately on your touch-enabled phone? Have you held off on buying a touch-enabled handsets, or is the utility of the iPhone enough to make typing troubles non-existent?
Also, do you think Nokia can deliver a winner of a touch handset, or are they just too late to the game?
We look forward to the comments!
[image courtesy: MaxRoam]
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April 12th, 2009 at 2:49 pm
I can’t see why Nokia can’t fight back – after all, Apple were very late to the game and stole a march on Nokia and Samsung and Motorola! The question is whether Nokia are too big and not sufficiently flexible to be able to change and adapt – can they mould S60 to their will quickly enough? Will the internal politics at Nokia allow it to happen?
Nokia have fingers in many pies – S60, Linux on their tablets with competing GTK and QT toolkits, so it’s not as if they’re lacking in technology.
April 15th, 2009 at 11:39 am
This will be an exceptional phone. Nokia in my opinion will win some touch screen skeptics as it is the first high profile phone to offer both touch screen as well as keypad