Nokia Confirms Its iPhone Killer: Nokia Tube

During his speech at Evans Data developer conference in the US, Tom Libretto, vice president of Forum Nokia confirmed that the Finnish company is working on a new phone, a touch screen, called for the moment Tube.

Still, Tom Libretto didn’t give away to many details about the Tube. “It's our first touch device,” he said.

Apparently, the Nokia Tube will be powered by a new version of Symbian operating system, but nothing is official so far.

Also he hinted about a Java built in support as a standard, a feature which isn’t available on Apple’s iPhone for the moment. Bu shortly after Apple released the first beta of the iPhone SDK, Eric Klein, Vice President of Java Marketing, has announced Sun's intention to port the JVM to the iPhone.

As for Tube, Libretto said that the new phone will include support for the DVB-H mobile TV standard for Europe and mobile video.

Last month the European Commission decided to add the Digital Video Broadcasting Handheld standard (DVB-H) to the EU List of Standards, which serves as a basis for encouraging the harmonised provision of telecommunications across the EU.

DVB-H is largely based on the DVB-T specification for digital terrestrial television, adding to it a number of features designed to take account of the limited battery life of small handheld devices, and the particular environments in which such receivers must operate.

According to Libretto, the Nokia Tube will include also a feature which will allow its users to upload to the web, which means that the new device will integrate Wi-Fi or HSDPA connectivity. Unfortunately, Libretto didn’t indicate any release timeframe for this new phone.

During his presentation, he noted that Nokia is not afraid to compete with Apple or the success of the iPhone. He compared compared shipments of iPhone to Nokia's numbers.

Apple has shipped so far 6 million iPhone and Libretto noted: "We've done that [volume] since we've had dinner on Friday."

from what i've seen, it looks like it could have a stylus....if so, then I might wait til the Iphone Killer comes out...which is a second "bigger" iteration of the Nokia touch device.

ouch! This phone sounds pretty tight