With the impending release of the Nokia Tube and its new S60 touch UI, can it finally beat the iPhone? There are a lot of factors to consider. For one, unlike Apple, Nokia already has an established customer base that has catapulted the Finnish company as the no. 1 brand in the mobile phone industry. However, this time around, they’re venturing into uncharted territory as they try to adapt a technology that has been popularized by a rival competitor.

So, can the Tube and it’s touch-S60 OS overthrow Apple from the top-spot as far as touch-screen enabled mobile phones are concerned? According to our source, the S60 OS is pretty much outdated and it could be the downfall of the new touch UI. Research director Ian Fogg says:

Nokia phones have had step-by-step improvements but no radical breakthroughs for several years. S60 is fairly simple graphically, and they’ll be looking to change that.

He further adds that the recent move open licensing could prove to be disadvantages as it will provide some compatibility issues in the long run primarily due to the sheer number of 3rd party software developers and the variety of devices that run on the S60 OS. It would become hard for Nokia to monitor all these apps and their performance across the various S60-running devices especially since those devices have various hardware components as well.

The points he raised are quite interesting, though I am not bothered too much by it. For starters, Nokia has already made available for quite sometime now a means for users to easily update their phone’s software through the internet, and as I see it, whatever version or state the touch-S60 is in, it can just be updated the same way Apple does with the iPhone and iPod. Second, on the issue of 3rd party app compatibility, there will likely be problems during the first couple of months or years, but as is the current situation, the user is primarily responsible for whatever he/she install on their phone and its been that way for quite sometime now. So, I don’t see it being a major problem when the Nokia Tube and this new OS starts to roll out.

Will the Nokia Tube beat the iPhone in terms of performance? I don’t think so. Current specs of the touch S60 don’t even mention support for multi-touch so I don’t it will be in the same league as the iPhone. I do, however, believe that Nokia’s touch-screen enabled phones will eventually beat the iPhone in sales simply because their phones are far cheaper than Apple’s most prized mobile. Probably not now, but somewhere down the road when later variations of the touch-S60 come out.

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