Nokia N97 and 5800 to finally get kinetic scrolling, as firmware 2.0 gets videoed

Finally! One of the biggest complaints with the Nokia 5800, N97 and all other touchscreen products has been the lack of kinetic scrolling, and the Finnish giant is all set to address that.

At the annual Nokia World mega-event in Stuttgart, Germany – where the company has already announced a new iPhone-killer with capacitive touchscreen and launched the N97 Mini – Mark Guim of The Nokia Blog got a spokesperson to show off the new firmware 2.0 update for the Symbian S60 5th edition platform for touchscreen phones, and caught it all on video.

We strongly recommend you watch the whole thing, but otherwise, here are the salient points:

1. Better kinetic scrolling: First off, we are overjoyed to see that the update brings kinetic scrolling to Nokia’s line-up. Swiping your finger up or down to have your contact list roll over was one of the iPhone’s coolest features, but had not been incorporated in the S60 so far. But firmware 2.0 fixes that and brings kinetic scrolling to all possible interfaces, including contact list, apps menu, music player, etc.

2. Reduced memory usage: The other big improvement is the reduction of memory usage. The S60 5th edition has been heavily criticised by reviewers and users for taking up too much onboard storage space, thus reducing the ability to add essential applications. The Nokia spokesperson in the video says that the new update fixes this by reducing memory usage by a whopping 25-30MB!

3. New and updated apps: Speaking of applications, firmware 2.0 will also bring a few new additions to the Nokia Apps, such as CNN Video, ESPN Soccer, etc. and also update existing apps such as the Facebook one.

4. Sluggish performance persists: What the new update doesn’t seem to fix, though, is the sluggish performance at times. The phone still looked visibly slow when the spokesperson was starting up the music player. Perhaps the only hope on that front for Nokia fans is Maemo 5.

The Nokia spokesperson said that the new firmware 2.0 update is expected be available to all Nokia touchscreen phones in October, downloadable directly through the software update client.