08 April 2008

"Tube" is the code name
of upcoming Nokia's iPhone killer!

Nokia made waves with their recent announcement of the S60 touch interface at the Symbian Smartphone Show a few months ago and now they officially said yesterday that they remain at work on the iPhone killer with a codename "Tube,"

Shown in a slide at the Evans Data Developer Relations Conference in Redwood City, Calif., Tube looks similar to the popular iPhone. The Nokia device showed graphical displays, such as a promotion for the movie Shrek the Third.

There is no word about the OS and the platform but I guess that it will be based on the Symbian OS and the 5th generation of the series sixty user interface.

"It's our first touch device," said Tom Libretto, vice president of Forum Nokia. Interfacing with the system is done via touch similar to the iPhone. He said the company has not published the planned date of shipment for Tube.

This is the pretty confusing statement that hasn’t anything with the real situation!? As you may have already know, S60 is just one of the platforms that Nokia uses among its devices. There are a few more platforms ranging from the "dummy" S40 platform to the Linux powered Maemo platform that, by the way, features touch user interface (latest device is the N810 Internet Tablet with great high-resolution 4.1" touch screen and impressive 800x480px resolution which is the same as the Nokia 7710 that is powered by the Symbian OS and S90 platform, announced almost three years before the iPhone.)

So it will not be the first Nokia touch device definitely but I hope it will be the bets one so far, the very first Nokia phone that will run 5th generation of the S60 user interface with a touch UI!

Nokia believes it can compete with iPhone, and during his presentation, Libretto compared volume shipments of iPhone to Nokia's shipments of phones. Since the launch of iPhone in June, Apple has shipped 5 million to 6 million of the devices, paling in comparison to Nokia's device shipments, Libretto said. "We've done that [volume] since we've had dinner on Friday," he said.

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