New Nokia Device Won't Be Here by Holidays

Updated from Oct. 2

It's refreshing to report on a device that's not meant to be an Apple (AAPL Quote) iPhone killer -- or an iPhone clone.

Nokia (NOK Quote) has announced its first touchscreen handset. It's called the 5800 XpressMusic phone and it is targeted at young users -- not business people.

It looks like a terrific device, but not for us. Reuters has confirmed the device will go on sale in India, Indonesia, the United Arab Emirates, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Russia and Spain by year-end but will miss the Christmas shopping season in other markets, including the United States.

The 5800 is a small device with a large screen that measures 3.2 inches diagonally (640 by 360 pixels) with up to 16 million colors. It has 81MB of internal memory and comes with an 8GB micro-SD card as standard equipment. A 16GB card from SanDisk (SNDK Quote) also is available. The 5800 runs on Nokia/Symbian's S60 fifth edition operating system.

As for connectivity, the handset is a GSM/EDGE/HSDPA 3G device along with 802.11b/g Wi-Fi and Bluetooth (with stereo audio) and USB 2.0 connectivity. That means AT&T (T Quote)could sell it here in the U.S. It also has A-GPS and Nokia Maps for voice-guided navigation.

The 5800 has a pair of decent- sounding stereo speakers -- it is a music device -- and a 3.2 megapixel camera with a Carl Zeiss lens and a dual-LED flash. Battery life is reportedly as much as nine hours (GSM) or five hours (HSDPA), 35 hours for music playback or three hours of video. Standby time is up to 17 days.

The touchscreen differs from some other popular phones in that the users must touch specific places on the screen to activate features. In other words, the whole screen is not necessarily "live" to your touch at any given time. Because this is a music device, that could be a good thing. We'll make a final judgment on that when we get a 5800 to test.