Mobile Phone News:

Say what you like about the Apple iPhone (and people have. Over and over again), but it’s certainly stirred up the mobile phone world. The big boys of the mobile world, Nokia and Sony Ericsson, seem to have had their fighting spirit (maybe it’s that Nordic thing?) stoked up, and are fighting back against the iPhone with their own new, improved, super-swanky touchscreen interfaces.

2008 is going to be the year the touchscreen phones go to war!

Announced first was Nokia’s new S60 Touch interface, giving Symbian Series 60 a whole new touchy-feely vibe. But not content at stopping there, Nokia have been perfecting something else, something they call ‘Haptikos’, which they promise will give an experience identical to using a hardware keyboard.

To quote Roope Takala, research manager at Nokia, “The basic technology is not that difficult. We inserted two small piezo sensor pads under the screen and engineered in a 0.1mm movement in the screen itself. What’s taken the time has been fine tuning the movement and response to mimic exactly the sensation of pressing a real key.”

So, basically, if you press a key onscreen, you get the same clicky noise as a real key, but also, crucially, the tactile feedback of one, with the downstroke and upstroke, instead of just a random buzz.

While Nokia have gone down the route of perfecting technology and making everything seem real, Sony Ericsson have gone down the other route of making everyone go, “Whoa, that’s cool!!” with their brand new version of the UIQ interface.

You can see from the pics that it is really quite inspired by the iPhone, with full touch controls, and a super speedy, intuitive interface. Very obviously inspired by the look of the iPhone as well. Very obviously inspired by it. One might even say a bit too obviously inspired by it.

Methinks Sony Ericsson were setting out in this presentation to say, “OI! APPLE! NO!”

All of this tells us something though. We knew all along that the big phone manufacturers wouldn’t let Apple come in and take their market share without a fight, but this editor thinks that Apple provided them with a wake up call. I mean the N95 was nice and everything, but it wasnt groundbreaking. Sony Ericsson have stuck with the same idea time and time again (make the camera better) and Motorola have had the same damn keypad for about 500 years.

With players like Nokia and Sony Ericsson finally waking up it looks to be an exciting year. We also know that Apple aren’t just going to lie around on their butts either. Whatever happens, it seems very clear now, that with all 3 manufacturers… the gloves are off, and 2008 is the year we the customer get fabulous new technologies by the bucketload in our phones, as these 3 big boys scrap it out.

Ah, gotta love it! Oh, and on a side note, I’d just like to say Technical Markus is gonna be gutted I beat him to this story. That’ll teach him to rib me about Aurora!

[EDIT: Yes, he is… - Technical Markus]