Recently, Nokia has unveiled their first touch-screen phone, the 5800 Xpressmusic, which due both to its simfree price ($395) and its features is expected to pose a major threat to Apple’s iPhone.

The $395 selling price, although it does not include subsidies and taxes, is still approximately half the amount of money smartphone users have to pay for other top products on the market.

Moreover, customers will be getting the 5800 Xpressmusic free of charge if they agree to sing a contract with operators, which, as research head at CCS Insight Ben Wood has stated, would put a lot of pressure on Apple Incorporated.

Previously known as „Tube,” the 5800 Xpressmusic is Nokia’s second touch-screen phone, the first one having been launched back in 2004. The gadget, Nokia 7710, was fitted with a touch-screen colour LCD with a 640 x 320 pixels resolution and featured an integrated Megapixel camera, an integrated FM radio and also Bluetooth.

The new model’s features include a 3.2-megapixel camera with a dual LED flash, a frontal camera for video calls, an 8GB memory card (but can support up to 16 GB cards), GPS and Wi-Fi.

Nevertheless, the most exciting fact about the 5800 Xpressmusic is that it is fitted with the producer’s „Comes with Music,” a tool enabling users to download an unlimited number of tracks from the Nokia Music Store. No fee required within the first year from the purchase of the gadget. Nokia has stated that most independent music labels, along with all the major ones would be offering songs to the feature’s library, estimating that the total number of tracks would soar to approximately 5 million. Nokia’s “Comes with Music” is expected to go head-to-head with Apple’s iTunes Store, an online digital media store that has sold, since June this year, 5 billion songs. Consequently, Apple currently has a strong grip on more than half of the digital music sales, a grip that Nokia might come to loosen with its new device, since it offers their users free songs. Buying a track from the iTunes Store costs customers $0,99.

Speaking of Nokia’s touch-screen phone having the upperhand over Apple’s iPhone, the 5800 Xpressmusic can record videos at VGA quality of 640 x 480 pixels (which the iPhone cannot), allows users to expand the phone’s memory with additional memory cards (Apple’s gadget has a built-in memory) and is said to support Adobe Flash from the start.

Nokia Corporation, a multinational company that focuses on wireless and wired telecommunications, sells more than 500 million devices annually, of which approximately 100 million are smartphones.

With 112,262 employees in 120 countries, Keilaniemi-headquartered Nokia has reported global revenue of 51.1 billion euros and operating profit of 8.0 billion since 2007.

The company have yet to reveal when they would be launching the 5800 Xpressmusic in the United States.