Gadget Performance

Anyone who likes touchscreen phones should be excited; the most well known face in the industry has announced not one, but TWO mobile phones: the sleek Nokia 5800 and the completely jaw-dropping Nokia N97.

Phones we'd rather forget – Nokia touchscreen mobile phones in the past


A lot of people are under the false assumption that the Nokia 5800 is the first touchscreen phone to wear the Nokia label. It isn't. The opposite's true, because there have been a few touch-based phones to wear the Nokia name. Starting with the 7700, we've seen a couple of Nokia mobile phones which are controlled by you prodding and poking the screen. They all had reasonably big (for their time) screens, but the other feature they had in common, unfortunately, was that they were utterly rubbish. Only one of those handsets, the 6708, displayed any promise, but that was destined exclusively to be sold in China, and thus, it never saw the light of day in Britain. So, we were relegated to handsets that were utter, and complete bobbins.

However, these unpleasant memories have now been exorcised by the debut of two new Nokia mobile phones, both of which come with touchscreens, and both of which are much, much nicer...

Nokia 5800 - if music be the food of love...

First up is a whole new member of Nokia's Xpress line of music mobile phones, the mouth-watering Nokia 5800. This one's quite obviously made for music and video; you can tell by the separate XpressMedia touch-key that opens a list of shortcuts to music, videos, the web, and so on. Oh, and the Nokia 5800 has a 3.2 inch touchscreen, to let you muck about with those different media content. Basically, the Nokia 5800 was created to be a little handheld jukebox and movie player, and as music handsets go, this is just about the sweetest. The Nokia 5800 has also got a 3 megapixel camera, HSDPA internet connection and sat-nav, so that it's a wonderful all-rounder, on top of being a superb media player. Oh, and it has a strap to clip on a fake guitar pick. That's pretty cool, that.

However, the Nokia 5800 is very definitely a mid-range device; it isn't, nor was it ever meant to be, an absolute top-ender. That position goes to another handset...

Nokia N97 - the single best phone EVER made?

With the Nokia 5800 all set to bring touchscreen mobile phones to the mid-range market, that leaves a very big gap at the very top-end, and yes, there IS a touchscreen mobile phone waiting to be unleashed to fill that gap: the utterly awesome Nokia N97. This uses the same Symbian S60 Touch operating system and crams it inside the body of a proper, full-tilt smartphone. Which means it has an even more huge, 3.5 inch screen, a slide out QWERTY keyboard, and the camera now weighs in at a meaty 5 megapixels. The Nokia N97 is, obviously, destined to be the new flagship Nseries mobile phone, and it really is as high-spec as we'd heard from rumours, with HSDPA, sat-nav, digital compass, and integrated Flash, meaning you get an internet experience that tops any other mobile phones! Put simply the Nokia N97 is simple incredible. It gleefully relieves itself over other mobile phones and as the Nokia 5800 angles firmly for the mid-range, I'm predicting that the Nokia N97 will totally DESTROY the competition in 2009!