The Nokia 5800 XpressMusic made its way around the various interwebs as the Nokia 5800 “Tube,” promising to bring with it Nokia’s answer to the current touchscreen revolution sparked by the iPhone and iPhone 3G. With S60 5th Edition, S60 Touch if you will, enabling complete touch functionality on Nokia’s 5800 XpressMusic touchscreen smartphone, Espoo is poised to to take on the likes of HTC, Sony Ericsson, T-Mobile, Samsung, and Apple in the touchscreen smartphone arena.
Unfortunately, it may take a bit longer than expected to get a Nokia XpressMusic 5800 smartphone into the hands of eager S60 fans in mature markets. We’re hearing that Nokia has dashed the dreams of so many XpressMusic 5800 hopefuls with their revelation that the ballyhooed handset would fail to hit most mature markets before the holiday shopping season.
While India, Indonesia, the United Arab Emirates, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Russia and Spain will be taking shipment of the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic touchscreen smartphone by year-end, the rest of Europe and North America will have to wait until 2009 before the Nokia XpressMusic 5800 becomes a reality. The Nokia 5800 XpressMusic will run €279 ($387) in unlocked, unsubsidized form. With contracts and subsidies, the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic could undercut the iPhone 3G’s price-point.
“The phone is competitively priced and Nokia’s competitive advantage is in emerging markets. When putting two and two together it’s logical they start the roll-out from emerging markets,” said analyst Neil Mawston from Strategy Analytics.
Whether or not it makes sense to bring the Nokia 5800 to emerging market first, it sure does make it that much harder for the rest of the developed world to hop on board the S60 Touch-train. With a little luck, Nokia will launch the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic and its S60 5th Edition OS in the US around the same time as it goes live in Europe.
This is the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic
[Via: Reuters]