While some are content to pit Android against atypical ‘rivals’ like the iPhone, InformationWeek’s Eric Zeman is posing the far more realistic question of what Nokia can do to preserve their 78-percent smartphone OS market share. 

“Even the latest iteration of S60 (which has been under constant development for eons) doesn’t do some of the things we saw in the Android demo. While Symbian and Nokia are probably hard at work developing touch-capable software and phones, Google already has done it, to a certain extent. The demos highlight how applications can be used and tied together seamlessly to create a natural workflow” Eric Zeman, InformationWeek

Thing is, Nokia have already been showing off their touchscreen cellphone concept: the imaginatively named Nokia Touch, which is set to launch sometime next year complete with the next generation in haptic-feedback.

As can be seen in the video, the concept - which, yes, is very similar to the iPhone - runs a heavily updated, far more streamlined version of S60; that would seem to put a tick in both boxes of Eric’s Android quandary:

“Will it have the hardware cache, the integrated platform that Apple has with the iPhone and its other products? Or the global manufacturing and distribution empire that Nokia has? Likely not. But the interface sure does some cool things. And as is evidenced by U.S. sales of the iPhone, people are tired of difficult user interfaces” Eric Zeman

However, people are also increasingly frustrated by handsets that promise a breakthrough but deliver last-gen hardware; if Nokia could put this new, tactile version of the smartphone OS into a handset that offers the same technical prowess of, say, the N95, it might be that Android’s primary challenge is not, as many believe, Microsoft, but the Finns.