The N95 may have been touted as a clear competitor to Apple’s web-friendly, big-screen iPhone but Nokia yesterday confirmed it is working on a direct rival with similar functionality and design: the Nokia Tube.
The Tube will be Nokia’s first touch device, said Tom Libretto, vice-president of Forum Nokia, at the Evans Data Developer Relations Conference in California yesterday, according to Paul Krill at InfoWorld.
While the handset manufacturer showed various slides demonstrating the Tube’s features as a widescreen media player, Nokia has released no information on its stages of development or on a forthcoming release date.
The Nokia Tube, unlike the iPhone’s Safari, will support Java on its web browser and like the iPhone has a built-in accelerometer so it can automatically switch between portrait and landscape modes for video and photos.
Libretto said Apple’s iPhone presented no competition to the Finnish firm, citing that while Apple has to date shipped around 4 million handsets, Nokia ships out this number in the course of a day.
Meanwhile, if predictions from gadget guru Walter Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal are anything to go by, Apple is stepping it up a notch with a 3G iPhone to be released on the market within 60 days or so.
By Marie Boran
