Ah, so it's not just me that loves plucking something really unusual out to show, something that was cutting edge for its time - even if it never made it (in this case) out to retail channels. The Nokia 7700 was the first Symbian phone to have a touchscreen OS and it used the 'Series 90' interface on top of Symbian, with a VGA width display. Jay Montano points out in his illustrated look at his own (non-working) example, that the Nokia 7700 dated from 2003, roughly four years before the iPhone was launched. The (non-Symbian) competition of the time was also partly touch-based, of course, albeit running Windows Mobile and also stylus-based.

Jay writes:

I’ve got a few pics of some Nokia classics to share in the run up to Nokia World. They’re in no particular order.

The first one we’re looking at is a touch screen multimedia phone from Nokia, announced in 2003 but it never made it to market.

This is a Symbian phone, already with a 640×320 screen, but with a very different Series 90 UI.

Great to see one of these collector's items in the flesh, and side by side with a modern smartphone too, the Lumia 900:

The follow up to the 7700, the 7710, [both Wikipedia links] was released, albeit with terribly small distribution, I'd guess that not more than a few tens of thousands were sold worldwide - Rafe and I do have one though. Something to break out and go all retro with at some point?

The 7710 was slimmer and more refined and was - just - usable as a day to day device, but the whole project got canned because of the rising sales from S60, in the shape of the 6630, N70 and, eventually, the world conquering N95. See also Andrew Orlowski's write-up of the whole saga, from the perspective of the 'Hildon' touch UI used in the 7700/7710.

See Jay's post for a load of other photos of the Nokia 7700, plus some 7700 videos he found on YouTube.