A Touch of Genius - Nokia 5800 and Nokia N97

The world of touchscreen mobile phones is starting to get exciting, as the biggest name in the industry has waded in with not one, but TWO mobile phones: the sleek Nokia 5800 and the completely mind-blowing Nokia N97.

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

A lot of people are under the incorrect impression that the Nokia 5800 is the first touchscreen phone to wear the Nokia label. It's not. Actually, there's been a few touchy-feely phones to wear the Nokia brand. Beginning with the 7700, the world has seen a few Nokia mobile phones that work by touch. They all had reasonably big (for their time) screens, but the other feature they had in common, unfortunately, was that they were unbearably hideous. Only one of these devices, the 6708, displayed any promise, but it was made only for the Chinese market, and so, it never saw the light of day in these sceptred isles. The mobile phones WE got were, and I use this phrase with much feeling, total, and complete toss.

However, those unpleasant mental images have all been removed by the announcement of two new Nokia mobile phones, both of which have touchscreens, and both of which are much, much nicer...

Nokia 5800 - touching music

The first phone on the list is a totally new member of Nokia's Xpress family of music mobile phones, the mouth-watering Nokia 5800. This one's pretty obviously built for music and video; you can tell by the dedicated XpressMedia touch-key which 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 files. Basically, the Nokia 5800 was created as a teeny handheld jukebox and movie player, and as music phones go, this is easily one of the prettiest. The Nokia 5800 also comes with a 3 megapixel camera, HSDPA internet connection and GPS, so that it's a wonderful all-round mobile phone, on top of being a wonderful media gadget. Oh, and it has a strap to fasten on an imitation guitar pick. That rocks.

Despite all those features, the Nokia 5800 is very definitely a mid-range phone; it's not, nor will it ever be, an absolute top-ender. That position goes to a different mobile...

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 huge, yawning gap at the very top-end, and yes, there IS a touchscreen mobile phone on its way to take its place as the top-end powerhouse: the genuinely mind-blowing Nokia N97. This uses the same Symbian S60 Touch interface and crams it into the body of a proper, full-on smartphone. So it's got an even more huge, 3.5 inch screen, a slide out QWERTY keypad, and the camera's been upgraded to 5 megapixels. The Nokia N97 is, as should be glaringly obvious, destined to be the new flagship Nseries mobile phone, and it's genuinely as hyper-powered as the rumours had us believe, with HSDPA, GPS, digital compass, and built-in Flash, so that you get an internet experience that tops any other mobile phones! Put it like this: the Nokia N97 is awesome. It easily outdoes other mobile phones and as the Nokia 5800 angles firmly for the mid-range, I reckon that the Nokia N97 will totally DOMINATE the world in 2009!