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As expected, Nokia is demonstrating the next version of its S60 platform at the Mobile World Congress this week. This is the first version of the platform, which runs on top of the Symbian OS, to include support for touch screens - a la Windows Mobile and, most famously, the iPhone.

Yesterday, at the show, CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo strongly indicated Nokia would introduce touch screen S60 smartphones during the second half of 2008, which is when Nokia expects the S60 upgrade to become available.

Nokia's also  posted a video demo of the touch edition of S60 in action on its marketing blog. Rather than showing it off on a smartphone, Nokia is demonstrating the interface on a larger tablet-style device.

In addition to touch, the new S60 interface adds support for Haptic or tactile feedback, where users feel a physical pulse when tapping a display. Additional enhancements include motion, proximity (like the iPhone) and light sensors, as well as full integration of Adobe's Flash Lite in its web browser.

Flash Lite integration should enable them to view Flash-enabled Web sites containing animation and videos (YouTube, for example) just as they would on their desktops.

Nokia says all current S60 3rd Edition applications will be able to run just fine on upcoming touch-enabled S60 devices, unmodified; although developers will be free to enhance their software for S60's new and improved capabilities.

Until this update to S60, if a Symbian smartphone vendor wanted to offer a touch interface, then Sony Ericsson's UIQ platform was their only choice. Hence, the reason Sony Ericsson's smartphones feature touch input—it owns half of UIQ, having sold a 50 percent share of the subsidiary to Motorola last year.

Today, even though S60 doesn't support touch screens, it is by far the most popular smartphone platform in the world, accounting for 53 percent of the global market share during the second quarter of this year, according to Canalys.

Nokia would like S60, and by extension its smartphones, to maintain its commanding market share. With the all-touch iPhone making such a big splash, Nokia needed to get in-touch with touch screens as soon as possible.

Let's hope the Nokia upgrade does more than simply graft touch input onto S60, giving the platform some of the pizzazz Apple and even HTC brings to the touch screen table.

[via Engadget]