Nokia to offer Touch Screen support for S60 Smartphones

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Nokia Adding Touch-Screen Support to its Smartphone OS

Nokia has announced plans to add touch-screen capabilities to its Series60 (S60) front end for Symbian based mobile phones. The company says the touch user interface in S60 software offers licensees the opportunity to develop devices with a variety of input methods, whether it is a touch screen with a traditional keypad, touch screen with a qwerty keyboard or touch screen alone, supporting both finger or stylus optimized input, in addition to the range of access options that already exist today.

The software will also support tactile feedback, which means that there is a physical pulse and feedback when the user taps on the screen.

Flash Video will also be integrated with the Web Browser for S60. This allows people to view on the go Flash-enabled Web sites and Flash Video, such as YouTube, as they would do on their desktops.

"S60 on Symbian OS offers a great platform to innovate with Internet services", said Matti Vanska, Vice President, Mobile Software Sales and Marketing, Nokia. "We see experiences converging, and people demanding more and more of the functionalities that smartphones offer, both of which highlight the significance of ease of use. The focus of our strategy is to give people choice and simplicity - both key to delivering the best user experiences to add value to people's lives."

These technologies will be available for all S60 device manufacturers during 2008.

S60 has a 53% global market share for smartphone OS front ends in Q2 2007 according to research firm, Canalys. Nokia licenses S60 to other vendors, and currently LG, Lenovo, Panasonic and Samsung have all released S60 based phones.

Nokia Adding Touch-Screen Support to its Smartphone OS