S60 Touch is for now...S60 with a touchscreen!

I have been expecting this, since it was only marginally reffered to in the keynotes on Monday.

First, let's see the "demo" video. It's kinda hard to even call it that, since it runs on an emulator, but anyway, here it is:



Yes, it's not polished at all. Yes, it's only basically adding support for touchscreens in S60. And it might feel rather disappointing, however my take on this is that this will only be 'v1'. A second version, or generation, that will probably arrive in 2009, will surely be the eye-candy-packed one everyone's been waiting for since the announcement of the iPhone.

Why is this not a revolution? Well I don't think it could have been. I think Nokia is doing the right thing here. Touchscreen support was anyway long overdue for S60 (UIQ had it since the, ehm...beginning), so it's a nice addition. The fact that everybody was expecting an "iPhone killer" had more to do with people's expectations than with real R&D by Nokia. Let me explain: I think that Nokia's R&D have been working on adding touchscreen support (to rival UIQ) for quite some time when the iPhone was announced last year, but only started to think about an iPhone-ish Touch UI (as in very easy to use and entirely finger friendly) after that. So there really wasn't enough time, from then till now, for Nokia to show us something special. Also, anytime the desire for a UI that will kill the iPhone arises, please take into account the huge number of patents Apple holds on all things related to the iPhone.

What is in the video above is what Nokia managed to to in this short time, by shifting focus to a finger-friendly UI. And it's not bad. I personally am looking forward to to the second version more than to this first release (which does have one big 'thing' going for it: the learning curve for an existing S60 user will practically be inexistent).