NOKIA, ONE of the top mobile companies in India had finally launched the much-awaited touchscreen phone – Nokia 5800 XpressMusic. The launch of touchsreen phone in India is touted as the company’s answer to the latest sensation Apple iPhone. However, the world’s top mobile phone maker has priced the touchscreen phone cheaper than Apple iPhone in India. Nokia 5800 XpressMusic is reportedly priced at Rs 21,800 for the Indian market (about Rs 9,000 less than eight GB Apple iPhone and Rs 14,000 less than 16 GB Apple iPhone).

Nokia 5800 XpressMusic is supposed to hit the Indian market in early January 2009 and the phone has some special features, which challenges Apple Inc’s dominance in the digital music market. The phone can handle as many as 60 different languages and it supports both finger and stylus touch. Nokia 5800 XpressMusic will be available in black, red and blue variants.

On the external looks front Nokia 5800 XpressMusic measuring 111 x 51.7 x 15.5 mm has screen and rounded corners like Apple iPhone. The phone weighs 109 grams and the screen size is 81mm (3.2-inch) diagonally, with 640x480-pixel touchscreen display, which can play multiple types of video at a high resolution. The phone also has an accelerometer for display rotation.

Nokia 5800 XpressMusic comes with 81MB internal memory, 8GB microSD memory card, capable of storing approximately 6,000 songs. The memory of the phone can be further expanded up to 16GB. Nokia 5800 XpressMusic is equipped with the Symbian S60 interface.

Positioned as a music phone, Nokia 5800 comes pre-loaded with a vast range of music collection. Nokia’s Comes With Music service is the special feature of Nokia 5800, which will allow users to download music for free for a year from a catalog that includes 4 million songs.

Nokia touchphone supports playback protected windows media audio (WMA), advanced audio coding (AAC) and MP3 and is reportedly compatible with windows media player 11. The phone has a media bar, a drop down menu that provides direct access to music and entertainment.

The battery life of Nokia 5800 XpressMusic is reportedly as much as nine hours (global system for mobile) or five hours (high-speed downlink packet access), 35 hours for music playback or three hours of video. As per company claims the standby time of the battery is up to 17 days.

Nokia 5800 XpressMusic has 3.2 megapixel camera with a Carl Zeiss lens and a dual-LED flash with 30 fps video recording. The phone also has a second backward facing camera. In addition, the phone has built-in surround stereo speakers, Nokia maps, global positioning system (GPS), Wi-Fi, stereo bluetooth and a top-mounted 3.5mm headphone socket.

Like the Apple iPhone, the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic has flash support, a technique used to power many online video services and websites. Nokia’s touch phone offers support for 3G, which enables faster web browsing and downloading. A new contacts bar lets users to highlight four favourite contacts on their homescreen. There is also an option to track digital history of recent text messages, email, phone logs, photos and blog updates.

However, the major drawback of Nokia 5800 XpressMusic is that the phone cannot download extra software and applications like Apple iPhone and Google G1. But the positive aspect is that Nokia touchscreen phone will not have operator lock, unlike Apple iPhone with Bharti and Airtel. Besides, in the market price the phone will give tough competition to Apple iPhone, which retails at Rs 31,000 for eight GB and Rs 36,000 for 16GB in India.