One of the most disappointing announcements at the Mobile World Congress, to my mind, was Nokia’s S60 Touch platform.  Having seen the preview videos from several months ago, suggesting an iPhone-rival handset, I was expecting a strong showing intended to cement S60’s position as the most implemented smartphone OS.  What Nokia actually demonstrated was a generic touchscreen tablet device attached to a PC emulator, which - from the look of this video by MobileBurn’s Michael Oryl - responded patchily to touch input and failed to create any excitement about the new version.

The problem is, without knowing more about the hardware it’s difficult to say whether it’s that at fault for poor touch response, or the OS itself.  What is clear is that Nokia is still lagging considerably behind Apple and even Microsoft in their touchscreen development; gestures, scrolling and panning are all pretty rudimentary, perhaps due to Nokia’s intention to make just one version of the software for both touchscreen and non-touchscreen devices.

I’m not sure what to think, now, really; I want to still be excited about Nokia’s OS, but on the basis of their showing at the MWC it all seems a bit half-assed.