“The 5800 XpressMusic (aka Tube) is the first touchscreen Symbian S60 phone from Nokia—a surprising fact considering how prominent touchscreens have quickly become over the last few years,” John Mahoney reports for Gizmodo. “And instead of rolling out the new touch-specific S60 Fifth Edition on a flagship N-series phone, Nokia has decided to position the 5800 as a music phone for the kiddies, packaging it with their all-you-can-eat (and keep) Comes With Music service. This choice is probably a brilliant one, because after our quick demo, this thing needs a bit more time in the oven before it can stand with the big guys for a touchscreen-only device.”
“While the touchscreen is sharp and bright, it’s resistive rather than capacitive, which means instead of accurately picking up the light zap of electricity from your fingertips, it registers where two thin layers of the screen get pushed together under your finger,” Mahoney reports. “On the prototype we played with briefly, it’s much harder to get touches to register, and far less accurate than the iPhone’s capacitive screens.”
“The 5800 packs a built-in stylus for this reason—you’ll be using it a lot,” Mahoney reports. “Don’t plan on using this thing for heavy emailing or texting—you’ll probably be using T9 text entry with the touch dialpad or the stylus for most of your text entry unless you have the patience of a monk, which kind of defeats the point for an all-touch device these days.”
Full article, with video of hands-on demonstration, here.
fake iTunes and iCal icons.
“This choice is probably a brilliant one, because after our quick demo, this thing needs a bit more time in the oven before it can stand with the big guys for a touchscreen-only device.”
What other “big guy” is there besides Apple for a touchscreen device? Really?
“You’ll probably be using T9 text entry with the touch dialpad or the stylus for most of your text entry unless you have the patience of a monk”
Or a monk-eyboy
No wonder it’s not multitouch, it’s using a resistive screen! Ack, epic fail.
It’s a bit of an ugly lump, compared to the iPhone.
Loserville.
Halloween must be early this year. Everyone is dressing like an iPhone.
good grief.
It’s like iPod/iTunes all over again:
A bunch of copycats competing with “more features” rather than with better implementation and innovation.
Damn, did you see how poorly the interface works in the demo unit?? First, the “touches” look more like pokes, which is unfortunate, but even more annoying is how long everything takes to happen on it…. and the best part is when you change orientation it actually goes blank like it crashed before redrawing the screen.
Awesome work there, software guys!
How thick is that thing!
ITS A BUNCH OF SH!T
RAWRRRRR!!!!
Toss us any non-Apple products and we’ll rip them apart like rabid dogs on red meat!
RAWRRRRR!!!!