Especially as the iPhone wasn't even the first mass-market touch-screen phone.

I love gadgets and stuff as next as the next person, but this isn't going to increase the battery life any is it? -and that's pretty much the most important feature of a phone, besides it's ability to make calls of course..

The Series80 (or was it Series90) had a touch interface years ago so Nokia are hardly aping Apple and the iPhone. Rather it's a merging of their existing UIs, something they've been talking about for ages.

Your basic touch screen techs (resistive, capacitive), orientation sensors, acceleration sensor, light sensor don't really take much power. Could even be as low about 1/1000th of one LED indicator. The lack of them has been more about cost and size than anything else.

After my N80 got ran over last week I pulled my trusty old 7710 out of the drawer while I waited for the insurance to cough up. I was reminded what a lovely platform Series 90 was, only it was utterly hamstrung by the slow hardware and unfinished software. And then, of course, they killed it by "merging" the S90 platform into S60 and are now chasing Apple's tail because whoops, maybe there IS a market for touch screen phones with properly sorted interfaces!

Ironically the N800 is everything the 7710 should have been - fast and (more) finished (than S60v3.1). I'd love to see Nokia release a tiny 3G phone (not even a phone really, call it a Network Access Appliance) whose only real function is to be a hub for the N800 to access the internet and a bluetooth headset for voice calling. Two-box solutions are fine when one of the boxes is so small as to be negligible...

Hopefully some of the interface work going into S60's touch resurgence will filter down into Hildon in IT2008/9, but Nokia's capacity for joined up thinking seems to have died with S80.

Why does the image of thousands of people twitching inexplainably in the street come to my mind ?

S60 benefited from the S90 work to enable differing UI styles, you can bet that S60 3rd Edition devices have had touch screen capability that has simply not been enabled.

The market wasn't ready for S90, now it seems that has changed and as you might expect Nokia are ready.