The 5800 XpressMusic may be delayed for some people, but apparently, the boys and girls at the FCC aren't included in that flatly unlucky group. Nokia has passed a version of its first touchscreen S60 handset by the Fed's watchful eyes, and all's looking good except for one critical detail: this isn't the HSDPA 850 / 1900 version. We're sure it's coming, don't get us wrong -- but for the time being, this does us just about as much good as a Nokia with a resistive touch... ah, wait.

Every so often, Nokia will pop out a brick-like beast of a clamshell smartphone with a full QWERTY keyboard -- a black sheep in Espoo's lineup in every sense of the word. These so-called Communicators even had their own custom Symbian-based operating system, Series 80, until the E90 came around and brought 'em in line with the rest of the S60 crowd. Of course, S60 just took a big leap to the world of touch today, and that means the E90's starting to fall a bit behind -- so what's next? Nokia dropped a little teaser during its webcast today in the form of a stylized touch-based concept bearing strong family ties to the E90 and its ancestors, suggesting S60 5th Edition won't spell doom for the form factor. If it materializes, history suggests it won't be a mainstream device -- but if the real thing can look as good as this render, who knows?

While it may not be Nokia's first touchscreen phone (anyone out there remember the 7710?), the 5800 XpressMusic is certainly the first to come out of Finland with a mainstream appeal. What we've alternately known as the "Tube" throughout much of its development cycle is the first production device to run S60 5th Edition -- the fourth major overhaul of Nokia's ubiquitous smartphone platform since 2002 and the first to support fingers, styli, and high-res displays. Speaking of high-res displays, the 5800 comes equipped with an impressive 3.2-inch 640 x 360 resistive touchscreen to go along with its 3.2-megapixel autofocus cam, Carl Zeiss optics, dual LED flash, GPS, WiFi, 3.5mm jack, and a microSD slot with support for 16GB cards. It'll be available in three versions -- European HSDPA, North American HSDPA, and GSM only -- and ships this quarter in black, red, and blue for €279 (about $392) unlocked with an 8GB card thrown in for good measure. Music fans with voracious appetites for new tunes might want to hold out, though, for the Comes With Music-equipped version that follows on "early next year" at a to-be-announced price.

October 2nd: mark it down 'cause Reuters says that's the date that Nokia will launch its Nokia Tube -- aka, 5800 XpressMusic. According to a pair of industry sources, Nokia will launch the much anticipated, long overdue, S60 touchscreen device at a media and analyst event in London -- exactly as Pocket-lint's source told us earlier. All that's left now is for the invites to be distributed.

One day after Google goes touchscreen, along comes what looks to be an official press shot of Nokia's 5800 XpressMusic -- aka, the Tube. No new details here, though Nokia appears to have cleaned up the industrial design around the buttons of some of those earlier prototypes we've seen. October 2nd looks like the date that we'll finally get our fill of the first S60 Touch handset. Though given the number of leaks and rabid competition Nokia faces in the touchscreen OS space -- our appetite for this device might be quickly satiated.

[Via unwired view]

Well, we've seen the Nokia 5800 Tube's keyboard, home screen, video player, and uh, Bat-Sonar, so we might as well keep going with these shots of the browser. Kudos to Nokia for delivering something just slightly more impressive this time around than we're used to from S60 Touch, but we're still not feeling the super-90s aesthetic -- check out those icons at the bottom. We're still hoping to be blown away when this thing finally launches, but it's looking less and less likely with each new screenshot.

[Thanks, Marie]

A heaping handful of fresh alleged screen shots of S60 Touch's user interface are floating around, apparently yoinked off the platform's PC-based theme editor -- not as cool as if they'd been lifted from a Tube, granted, but still good enough to give us some clutch insight into where Nokia's taking this thing. As revolutionary as the move to touch control might be for S60 as a platform, the UI looks shockingly evolutionary so far; in fact, to the untrained eye, there are portions that are virtually indistinguishable from S60 revs of yore. That's good news (we suppose) for S60 diehards who aren't interested in learning a new paradigm -- and we're all for the VGA support here -- but it's bad news for anyone who was planning on having their noodles positively baked by Espoo's engineering manpower and massive R&D budget. Let's all just hold off on the negativity until Nokia gives us something official to ogle; for the time being, though, our boring UI-dar is definitely on high alert.

[Via Symbian Freak, thanks Misha]

Move along, nothing too new and thrilling here. We hunted down Nokia's touch demo and were completely un-thrilled by the whole package. Sure, it's still early days for the interface, but it's a case of same old same old as it's sporting the same UI, same OS, but now instead of using the d-pad, you're able to poke about with your finger. The demo was running on a small tablet in software only, no hardware yet, though, as we've already mentioned, devices should start arriving in the second half of the year. Hopefully Nokia will see the error -- in our opinion -- of its ways and drop some glitz -- feel free to pop on over and visit NVIDIA for some inspiration, Nokia -- down on this fairly glitz-free bit of wizardry. Hit the link to see the full gallery!

Nokia confirmed yesterday that we'd be seeing touch-enabled S60 devices in the second half of the year, which instantly started speculation over what a form the UI might take, as we've seen some pretty wild concepts from the Finns in the past. Sadly, however, it looks like touch S60 is going be exactly what the name implies and not a speck more -- check out this demo video posted on the Nokia marketing blog. Sure, it's being demoed off a PC on a touch tablet and anything could change, but we'd say that Nokia's goal of keeping S60 essentially the same to avoid confusing consumers is a little misplaced -- this seems like a terrific opportunity to roll out a sexy new version of S60 with touch at the forefront and re-capture the interest of all those Symbian users, so simply glomming touch onto the existing UI seems like a cop-out. Let's hope things get a little swoopier when the first devices show up in a few months, eh? Video after the break.

[Via Boy Genius Report]

After Sony Ericsson's big move into Windows Mobile territory (with help from HTC) you can be forgiven for thinking that Nokia might follow suit. Nevertheless, Nokia CEO, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, brought down the hammer on those rumors by saying, "We don't have plans to do Windows in mobile at the moment." Read into that time-boxed, English-as-a-second-language statement what you will. Better yet for S60 series fans, he committed to launching the S60 touch-screen platform in the second half of the year. More on the S60 Touch interface as the Mobile World Congress unfolds.