Nokia, in launching the 5800 XpressMusic touchscreen smartphone yesterday, created the strongest competitor thus far to the Apple iPhone 3G.

The new phone, previously code-named Tube, has several features designed to grab the iPhone’s luster. Most significant is Nokia’s Comes With Music service, which also works on the N95 and 5310 XpressMusic handsets, but has been criticized for its business plan.

Features of the 5800 include the Symbian S60 5th Edition operating system, GPS, 3.2-MP camera, tactile feedback and a video-out port. Hardware specifications include 9 hours of GSM talk time, 5 hours of WCDMA talk time, 17 days of standby, 35 hours of music playback, and 3 to 5 hours of video playback depending on format. The phone also has Wi-Fi, 81 MB internal memory and a microSD slot.

It’s important that Nokia is targeting worldwide markets, said Global Insight analyst Peter Boyland. Nokia’s worldwide market share of units shipped is nearly 40%, so the 5800 has a better chance at global success than at U.S. success, he said. The iPhone’s attractiveness is starting to wear off in the wake of technical problems, third-party software controversy and the increasing competitive options, he noted.

That’s not to say Nokia should take success for granted. The company has its own issues to confront, such as S60’s reputation for being slow and maintaining its huge scale.

Nokia said the phone will be available sometime in the fourth quarter this year, although that’s probably only in a few overseas markets. Its mainstream launch is not expected until early in 2009. The price before taxes and subsidies is approximately $385.

Mobile browsing is seen as the promise (and sometimes bane) of mobile content…while Apple’s (NSDQ: AAPL) Safari browser garnered a lot of attention for its “new features”, it was pointed out that other browsers had those features quite a while before. Laptop has done a not-very-scientific test of 3 mobile browsers—the Apple Safari on a 3G iPhone, Opera 9.5.1 beta and Skyfire beta on an AT&T (NYSE: T) Tilt. The results show a significant difference between Skyfire (fastest) Safari (second fastest) and Opera (slowest). One of the big things to come out of it are all the disclaimers which need to be added, which show that which mobile browser you should (or can) use depends on which phone you have. For example, Safari is twice as fast as Opera, but you need an iPhone. Opera probably runs on the most number of handsets and has more features than Skyfire, but is slower…so how much do you want those extra features? As Gizmodo points out Skyfire is server assisted, so a fairer comparison would have been with Opera Mini which also preformats web pages on a server before sending to the handset. The upshot is that if you make a conscious decision as to which mobile browser to use, it’s going to depend on your handset and what sort of browsing you like to do, and the upshot of that is that the mobile browser market is likely to remain a lot more fragmented than the desktop browsing market.

Swisscom has launched its mobile television service, Bluewin TV mobile, in Switzerland to become one of the first European providers to offer high-quality television experience to its mobile customers. Working together, Nokia and Nokia Siemens Networks enabled this service with their leading-edge mobile TV technology, services and expertise.

Bluewin TV mobile was launched on May 13 with quality comparable to that of the customers — home TV. The service is made available through a network based on the Digital Video Broadcast for Handheld (DVB-H) standard and can be watched on DVB-H-enabled mobile devices. Swisscom provides its customers with a range of subscription plans and Nokia N77 devices.

For this project, Swisscom’s wholly-owned subsidiary, Swisscom Broadcast chose Nokia’s Mobile Broadcast Solution, while Nokia Siemens Networks integrated the mobile television platform with Swisscom’s systems and provided a broad range of services, including project management, network and architecture planning, security and implementation.

“With the time constraints of the project, it was essential for Swisscom Broadcast to rely on one partner offering a solution based on open standards which can guarantee the end-to-end interoperability of the whole solution, from the DVB-H back-end system to the mobile devices” says Olivier Anthamatten, Head of Strategic Projects at Swisscom Broadcast.

With Bluewin TV mobile, featuring high-definition picture quality and excellent sound, the viewers have a choice of 20 channels, including SF1, TSR1 and Eurosport. An electronic program guide and an easy navigation key allow people on the move to always stay on top of the news.

Swisscom is one of the first DVB-H service providers in Europe and worldwide. Bluewin TV mobile marks a further step in the Group’s multimedia strategy and offers customers on the move the same viewing experience as with their TV at home.

Swisscom’s DVB-H broadcasts reach some 44 percent of the Swiss population, mostly in the area of Basel, Berne, Geneva, Zurich and Lausanne. Customers outside the DVB-H coverage area or without DVB-H handsets can receive Bluewin TV mobile on the Vodafone live! portal using UMTS/EDGE, which covers 99.8 percent of the population.