Nokia Tube, the latest and highly rumored exceptional Touch phone, is no longer a rumor as live images of the device leaked today plus some details about the device feature pack.

As symbian-freak.com reports, Nokia Tube runs on the latest Nokia 5th generation S60 full Touch UI and will be the first phone of a brand new handset lineup (no N-series here). Actually, Nokia Tube will not be even the flagship of that lineup – the actual flagship handset will be released shortly after the Tube.

Yet, the Nokia Tube already seems like a high-roller device that will have its say on the full touch market. The Tube is expected to have a 16M TFT display with 360 x 640 pixels resolution and 16:9 aspect ratio. The size of the display will be somewhere between 3 and 3.5-inches. The display will offer a tactile feedback but sadly, won’t have multi touch function like the iPhone.

A stylus input will also be provided as an option and using it would hand-writing recognition.

The communication department of Nokia Tube is at its peak, sporting quad-band GPRS/ EDGE/UMTS and HSDPA with uPnP support, as well as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth v2.0 with A2DP and AVRCP support. The built-in GPS with A-GPS and geotagging support completes the wireless communication set of the hi-end Nokia Tube device.

There is also going to be an auto-focus camera but the megapixel count is yet unknown.

Nokia Tube is expected to hit the market at the 1Q 2009.

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Word is that Nokia are finally preparing their own full Touch UI handset - codenamed “Tube”. An image of the new handset was shown in a presentation slide at an event held in California yesterday. While we don’t have the slide in question, we do know the Nokia Tube handset looks a lot like the Apple iPhone.

The Nokia Tube will be the first Touch UI device by Nokia and while Nokia officials are still not getting into details such as OS or shipping date, we are pretty much sure we are talking Symbian Touch UI here.

It would be a hard competition, since all sorts of rumors predict that Apple will be announcing a whole new 3G version of their over-hyped iPhone within 2 months and they will be releasing it within September.

Since the launch of iPhone in June 2007, Apple has shipped 6 million devices (actually being closer to 4 millions), but that doesn’t put them anywhere near to being a major Nokia competitor, Tom Libretto, vice president of Forum Nokia said. “We’ve done that volume since we’ve had dinner on Friday,” he shared.

Comments like that however only show the frustration of Nokia at the Apple’s success - be it minor in volumes when compared to the millions of low-end handsets Nokia sells everyday. There is no place for dispute that Apple have achieved enormous success with their first and only handset - they’ve changed the structure of the American market for mobile phones beyond recognition and managed to create an unprecedented hype that made the iPhone popular world-wide even before it set foot outside American soil.

We haven’t heard much of Nokia Touch UI interface since its announcement back in October 2007. While we did see a live demo at the MWC 2008 held in Barcelona, it was nothing close to a real device, but instead a computer emulation with a touchscreen.

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