Nokia has just made an announcement to launch it’s version of Touchscreen handsets to compete with the iPhone. Nokia remained coy about the widely-rumoured device, codenamed Tube.

Nokia’s senior vice president Soren Petersen said consumers wouldn’t have to wait long for the handset. “We will have touchscreen devices coming this year, and that’s about all I’ll say on that one.”

Petersen deflected criticism that Nokia has been slow to respond to the iPhone. “We are a big company, we are a platform-based company, which means, annoyingly, we do things very steadily and very solidly,” he said.

The following statement took me by surprise though:

“We will be selling, next year, half a billion phones. Something for us that sells eight or ten million [Apple's 2008 target figure for the iPhone] wouldn’t be that big a splash.”

I don’t think that would be a realistic figure to achieve, specially when you have a competitor like Apple at the other end. Because what is selling in the iPhone is not the hardware, but the software.

And by the time this phone comes out, if Apple is planning to drop down the price of iPhone at $199 (Rs. 8000), then every other person would have an iPhone for sure.

It will be exciting to see how these companies compete & what do they have to offer us.