Nokia 5800 Tube effect

Hello dear pundits,
As you probably know, Nokia has recently propelled it's beloved and enamoured Symbian-based S60 into a new era - era of analogue control. Analogous control may not be new per se (think of volume knobs, sliders, or even computer mouse manipulators), it is definitely new when applied to, arguably, the most ubiquitous thing on this planet - a mobile phone.

I will delay detailed usability analysis until the time that S60 Touch device lands in my hands, and this is probably for the better sales...
Let's think of it in more visionary way - what this means to the whole mobile market.
Now, here I do not share Mobile-Review's point of view, that this will surely crush the competition (Sony Ericsson UIQ, iPhone, Windows Mobile); neither do I think that devices like Nokia 5800 won't change much of the game.

I strongly believe, and see a reason behind such beliefs, that S60 Touch will change much of Nokia's own game.
It will certainly be elevated from XpressMusic line on to the N-series line of models, and thus will overtake significant portion of the current N-series users.
While it's too early to say much of whether the careful and confident approach of Nokia to creation of analogous control devices will capture many _new users_, one thing can be said right now - the S60 Touch platform will retain many of the current Nokia users.
In this sense, I see it much as a defensive move, not innovation.

And, amongst all of the possible defensive moves, Nokia chose the most conservative approach - not to change the user interface, but rather augment it with a touch screen enablement.
They could have decided to develop a new UI, or to shoehorn Maemo into cell phone devices, but what we see in 5800 is more a strategic move - new Symbian version, new S60 edition, a touch-based control of the old-style S60 UI, and two new features - contact bar and the media menu, which look as "strap-ons" to the existing UI goodness.

I am not trying to say that was wrong decision! That was a very careful and considerate, and wholly in line with Nokia's style - when you've got mammoth legs, move slowly but very assuredly.
Check your every step, so as not to fall and lose existing user base.
This is very considerate of us S60 users.
This is also very considerate of the S60 developers out there.
Apparently, Nokia sees S60 as it's greatest asset ever...
They are not carrying out revolutions a-la Guy Kawasaki, who once said (and still says so): "Kill your cash cow."

There have been previous attempts of Nokia to market touch-based devices, such as Nokia 7700 and 7710.
I don't know what went wrong with S90 - this looked very promising and innovative (for those times) devices.
My pure guess is that S60 had more Nokia people going to vote for them, in a political sense.
Bad luck, I must say. By now they might have been deeply entrenched into touch devices.

Should Nokia have decided to continue with S90 evolution,
There could have been no possibility and no market for iPhone!

Now I myself, personally used SonyEricsson P910i.
It was a remarkable phone, and in many ways that was the top usable device of those times.
I even consider it top usable device of SonyEricsson's all-times line.

It was a great pity and a great looming mistake, that SonyEricsson decided to drop UIQ2.1 and break all compatibility, and develop and debug on top of new UIQ3, which happened to be a flop, mostly due to the extremely buggy P990i.

Come on SE, I wanted hard to get a new phone to upgrade my aging P910i, but I simply could not make myself to buy your new crap.
It is incredibly wise and great that Nokia decided to go their different path, and not break compatibility (at least for some apps), and not to "revolutionize" S60 with completely new interface, which would almost inevitably have it's own sizeable share of bugs.
Here in 5800 we see beautiful evolution - precious time & effort spent on debugging the code is not lost, just the new features added.

Obviously, there have been people (even me) who tried to reason [for many years] for the renewal of the shut-down line of Nokia touch-screen devices.

But only Steve Jobs' voice was heard.

Now, 16 months after the iPhone, we can finally welcome Nokia to the analogue control game.

Would you use your PC/Mac without a mouse?
If in few years I would ask you "Would you use a smartphone without touch-based control?" my bets are that your answer will not be any dfferent.

(Yes, I remeber the old arguments from the DOS guy who would never use a mouse - but where are those now?)
We, humans, are analogue creatures. By nature.