NOKIA HAS launched the touchscreen 5800 Xpress Music device on the Irish market. It is designed to go head to head with the Apple iPhone.

The slim, black phone, with its emphasis on creating and sharing video, pictures and music, will beg comparisons to the revolutionary Apple gadget but successfully manages to create its own take on an all-in-one pocket device.

It is significantly smaller than the iPhone at 111mm x 51.7mm x 15.5mm, making it a lot easier to slip into a pocket, and is almost 25g lighter at 109g.

Although similarly priced to its Apple rival – from €100 on O2 and €40 on Vodafone – the 5800 does not require a specific monthly data plan, which, with the iPhone, will set you back €45-€100, although pre-pay options are now available.

A week-long test of the 5800 suggests that Nokia has responded to the Apple challenge and created what could well become an iPhone for the masses.

The tube, as it has already been nicknamed, features a 3.2” widescreen, 8GB of memory, a standard 3.5mm audio jack, VGA quality video recording and playback and a 3.2 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss lens.

Support for online sharing services, including Facebook, MySpace, Flickr and Nokia’s Ovi offering, is baked into the phone.

Recent Nokia smart phones have been hampered by lacklustre battery life. The 5800 will happily last almost two days even with relatively heavy multimedia usage, although lots of video playback will bring that down significantly.

Nokia also does an impressive job with the user interface: depending on whether you are trying to send a text, surf the web or listen to music the relevant commands appear on screen.

The built-in surround sound stereo speakers deliver on the promise of music anywhere and compare very favourably with the tinny sound that the iPhone produces unless connected to headphones or external speakers.

On the downside, the phone comes with a stylus which slips out of the side of the phone casing. Although it is possible to interact with the phone simply using your fingers, use of the stylus makes input quicker and more accurate. A useful feature is the slight vibration when you hit an input key, while a keyguard switch at the side of the handset ensures you don’t end up making calls from your pocket.

Nokia’s 5800 Xpress Music may not yet have the cachet of the iPhone but it is a cost-efficient if more pragmatic alternative.