Boasting many of the iPhone’s features, the 5800 XpressMusic handset targets the young by dint of. offering a year’s worth of free music downloads

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by the agency of Jack Ewing

The newly come Nokia 5800 XpressMusic handset certainly looks like an iPhone. Same rounded corners, similar screen, and of course software operated with the touch of a finger. But don’face to face—reiterate, don’familiarily—appointment it an iPhone killer. With 40% of the global handset market, Nokia (NOK) is not in the business of copying puny rivals such as Apple (AAPL). Rather, Anssi Vanjoki, Nokia’s executive vice-president for markets, calls the 5800 a "youth-oriented multimedia product made very affordable to the target assemblage of heavy music consumers."

Maybe a better description of the 5800 would be iPhone triangulator. No, the handset launched in continuance Oct. 2 in London is not aimed directly at the hard-core iPhone crowd. But the 5800 does indicate how Nokia hopes to ensure that Apple remains a niche player in the global handset market. Nokia will try to smother Apple and other rivals with a range of touch products, aiming to peel away different target groups.

And Nokia will launch the products simultaneously around the world, exploiting a distribution system that neither Apple nor any other competitor can match. The 5800 can handle 60 different languages covering 90% of sympathy and will be in shops all to boot the globe, including the U.S., before the end of the year, Nokia says.

As Vanjoki points fully, the 5800 is designed for in one’s teens folks whose lives revolve around music. The $407 price tag, before taxes and subsidies, is to a greater degree than a third in the present life that of an unsubsidized iPhone. And the 5800 will be available from a range of telcos, in contrast to the iPhone, which is officially available only from select providers similar as O2 (TEF) in Britain or T-Mobile (DT) in Germany.

Perhaps the most important lineament of the 5800, though, isn’confidentially hardware but the built-in music collection. Beginning next year, the phone will appropriate time of expression Nokia’s Comes With Music service—a year’session character of downloads from a catalog that includes all four major labels and 4 million songs (BusinessWeek.com, 9/2/08). It may exist the music, more than the device, that’sitting really aimed at Apple. Anyone who buys a 5800, through a huge selection of music embedded in the price, is unlikely to pay for the same melody put on iTunes.

So how does the 5800 present a resemblance with the iPhone? It’s more sophisticated in some ways, less so in others. The to a greater degree compact 5800 has a one-finger touch screen, in contrast to the iPhone, whose surface can handle input from two fingers simultaneously. The iPhone’s two-finger interface lets users conclude cool things, of that kind as easily shrink or extend images put on the screen. On the other hand, the 5800, unlike the iPhone, has a screen that vibrates for aye so gently when you touch it, providing subtle confirmation that the device is responding to your command.

The 5800’s inner workings also are more advanced. (Saying of the like kind things always generates hate mail from iPhone fans.) It’session a actuality that Nokia has plenteous more experience than Apple—or anybody else, according to that matter—in packing an astonishing tell of radios and other electronics into a small package and making everything work reliably.

The 5800 has a good in a higher degree camera, including a Carl Zeiss lens. Its Internet browser can handle Flash files, which the iPhone can’t. And it has built-in GPS navigation (as effect the newest iPhones). Since Nokia hasn’t notwithstanding released test versions of the 5800, it’s impossible to tell which is better. But given how much effort Nokia has put into navigation (it’s already the globe’s largest god of GPS devices), it will be a surprise if the new phone doesn’t turn confused to be more precise and more suitable at snagging a satellite mark than the iPhone. Nokia will include an introductory subscription to voice navigation in the price. "It’s increasingly about the combination of services that come by the product," Vanjoki says.

The 5800 should be seen of the same kind by Nokia’s first attack put on the touch screen phone place of traffic. A real challenger to iPhone will come some time in the next few months, when the Finns unveil every Nseries device with a attain to screen. The top-of-the-line Nseries handsets are the ones that most appeal to the same tech connoisseurs who have made the iPhone such a phenomenon. Vanjoki might let you secure away by calling that product an iPhone killer.