Nokia Extols Touch-sensitive Interfaces, This Week

Nokia's upper management quickly reverses its thoughts on optical and touch sensitive interfaces for mobile devices

Last week Nokia gave a vote of no confidence to the use of touchscreen technology in mobile phones. In an interview with Swedish newspaper, E24.SE, Nokia's General Manager of Mobile Devices, Antti Vasara, simply said that users prefer keyboards and joysticks over touchscreen displays and that Nokia is not enthusiastic about touch screens. Despite this, he did say that if Nokia sees the demand for touch screens, the company would use them in mobile devices.

A week later it seems that Nokia has seen the demand for touchscreen technology in mobile phones. Tero Ojanpera, Chief Technology Officer of Nokia, yesterday said, "Optical sensors and touch will be the next big things." His statement is a 180 degree turn from what Vasara said last week.

Ojanpera lauded touch screens, claiming the technology would allow cell phone makers to hide keypads. In addition, he said that movement sensors would also bring new and unheard of features to mobile phones. Ojanpera believes there will be a large amount of innovation between these two technologies.

HTC, LG and Apple all embraced touch screen technology. Dell and Hewlett-Packard pushed touch-sensitive displays for almost a decade on some devices.

Nokia, one of the few companies that refused to offer a Windows Mobile phone, might face its sudden interface problem alone. Over the last year, Microsoft unveiled optical and touch sensitive technology at a brisk pace with platforms like Surface and HTC's TouchFLO. Yet with Nokia's strong support for Symbian on its existing devices, the likelihood that Microsoft's sensing technologies will ever appear on a Nokia device is rapidly diminishing.
Reference:Gabriel Ikram,dailytech