I saw a demo of Nokia’s S60 Touch user interface at the Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona yesterday. The demo itself was running on a very generic looking tablet device attached to an emulator that was running on a PC since Nokia had no intention of showing us any future, unannounced S60 Touch hardware. It is worth noting that the mouse pointer that you might notice in the video below is from the PC, and is not going to be visible on actual S60 Touch handsets.

From my perspective, having reviewed a number of modern touch based devices, the S60 Touch emulator still appears to show that there is a lot of work yet to be done at Nokia. The demo shows that basic on-screen controls can be used with a fingertip, and that basic scrolling control and item selection work as well, but the system was not particularly responsive and didn’t handle scrolling and browser panning tasks all that well in my opinion.

Nokia has told us that the S60 Touch system, when it is being used in production devices, will be compatible with both touch and non-touch handsets. This means that developers won’t have to build two versions of their applications, as is currently the case with Windows Mobile. Nokia also said that we can expect some level of backwards compatibility, but I’m a bit leery of how much that will be the case. We already saw how S60 3rd Edition required many applications to be rebuilt to be supported by the new handsets it launched on.

In any case, have a look at the demo below. It should give you a bit of an idea as to what to expect from future Nokia devices.



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