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The release of the iPhone has gotten a number of smartphone vendors to kick their research and development teams into high gear. Case in point: Nokia. At the Symbian Smartphone Show in London this week, Nokia demonstrated the latest version of its S60 smartphone platform, which will now offer a number of iPhone-like features.

Due to ship to device manufacturers sometime next year—so it could be a while before an actual smartphone with it lands in your hands—the most significant innovation in the new edition of S60 will be the addition of support for finger and stylus touch input, with or without a keyboard or numeric keypad present.

Additional extensions to S60 include support for tactile, also known as haptic, feedback; motion, proximity (ala the iPhone) and light sensors; and full integration of Adobe's Flash Lite in its web browser.

With touch feedback users feel a physical pulse when tapping a display. While Flash Lite integration should enable them to view Flash-enabled Web sites containing animation and videos (YouTube, for example) just as they would on their desktops.

Nokia says all current S60 3rd Edition applications will be able to run just fine on upcoming touch-enabled S60 devices, unmodified; although developers will be free to enhance their software for S60's new and improved capabilities.

Like the UIQ platform, S60 runs on top of the Symbian operating system. Until now, if a Symbian smartphone vendor wanted to offer a touch interface, then UIQ was their only choice.

That's why most of Sony Ericsson's smartphones feature touch input—it owns half of UIQ, having just sold a 50 percent share of the subsidiary to Motorola—and all of Nokia's smartphones, most of which use S60, don't offer touch displays.

Nonetheless, S60 is by far the most popular smartphone platform in the world, accounting for 53 percent of the global market share during the second quarter of this year, according to Canalys.

Nokia wants it to stay that way. With the all-touch iPhone making such a big splash, it needed to get in-touch with touch screens as soon as possible. Hence, we got this week’s announcement, possibly months before manufacturers even get the enhanced S60 smartphone platform, and maybe even a year or more before users actually see devices with it installed.