Everyone’s probably heard of the Nokia Tube and its spanking brand-new touch interface, but is the Symbian OS up to the task? That’s the question raised by Techradar, and the words of research director Ian Fogg more or less answers that inquiry:

“Nokia phones have had step-by-step improvements but no radical breakthroughs for several years. S60 is fairly simple graphically, and they’ll be looking to change that.”

He also points out how the move to open licensing could prove to be detrimental as compatibility issues might arise in the long run due to the lack of an over-all monitoring system such as the App Store. Add the fact that there are other devices that use the S60 OS aside from Nokia, its hard to deliver the same quality of experience across a variety of devices that have different hardware specs.

Both points raised are legitimate issues that really need to be addressed for the Tube to be successful. Of course, initially, the S60 Touch UI will be raw and unexciting, but the groundwork has already been laid down for users to easily get and install the latest software updates. So, basically, what I see being released in the next couple of months will be a work-in-progress rather than the final product. Will it be the iPhone-killer everyone’s talking about? No, not now, but eventually, it will be especially with the more reasonable price of Nokia phones.

[via techradar]