The bad news - no new Symbian hardware at Nokia World 2011. The good news is that mention was specifically made of the existing ten next-gen Symbian^3/Anna/Belle handsets and commitment to keep the updates coming - it's safe to say that Belle will be on all ten devices fairly soon, variants and versions notwithstanding. Six new phones were launched today at the event, four using Series 40 and two running Windows Phone.
Nokia World 2011 starts today and the team is on the ground to bring you live coverage from Nokia's premier event. Over the next two days we'll be bringing you the key news, views and information. This news story contains our live coverage, where you can see the latest images and text updates; you can also interact with the team, asking questions and adding your own thoughts. Alternatively you can keep up to date by following our @aas or @aa_wp accounts on Twitter, where we will be posting text updates and images.
Being rolled out with only a day or so to spare before Nokia World hits is a 'service pack' for Symbian Anna, claimed to bring performance and usability benefits, plus faster email and messaging, quicker GPS fixes and a mysterious 'more' (presumably including minor bug fixes). So far we've only seen this (today) for our Nokia N8s, though I'd expect other Anna devices to also get offered this fairly soon. What's not to like?
Nokia World 2011 kicks off tomorrow, Wednesday 26th October and the entire 90 minute opening keynote is being webcast in video form to the world - so there's no excuse not to tune in and watch for yourself. Links below. We're expecting several Windows Phone handsets to be announced and we're very much hoping for some Symbian hardware too. Watch All About Symbian and All About Windows Phone for detailed stories on the announcements on the day!
Nokia Conversations, the public-facing site where stories from inside Nokia are brought to the wider world, has been given a rather impressive overhaul. Far more than just a cosmetic facelift, there's a 'notifications bar' (on the left) with dynamic links to breaking content and language controls, there's an emphasis on the 'big story of the day', the ability to contact individual story authors and a general de-cluttering of the interface.
Two of the most popular Nokia Beta Labs projects have recently ended, with very differing outcomes. Nokia Sleeping Screen, which enables custom bitmaps to be used as your OLED always-on time display, has graduated and is now in the main Nokia Store on-device. Meanwhile, Nokia Bubbles, which enabled an active lock screen in which you had to chase and drag the bubble for the app or shortcut you wanted onto the unlock icon, has been terminated. Some quotes and links below.
Nokia has released its Q3 2011 results, reporting an operating loss of -€71 million, with net sales of €8.980 billion (down 13% YoY). Nokia's Devices and Services division's profits were €132 million. Margins in devices and services were 2.4% (down from 11.3 % in Q3 2010 and up from -4.2% in Q2 2011). Total smartphone device sales were 16.8 million, compared with 27.2 million units in Q3 2010 (down 34% YoY) and 16.7 million units in Q2 2011 (up 1%, QoQ). The results were ahead of expectations and suggest the company has started on the road to recovery.
You've heard of top of the line smartphones costing over £500, you've heard of the original Nokia Communicator coming in near £1000 back in the day, but today's launch of the Vertu Constellation sees a Symbian smartphone in the "£4,000 to £10,000" region, according to the Telegraph. Or, as I like to put it, "if you have to ask the price then you can't afford it" territory.
New in Nokia Store, at a cost of 3 Euro, is PDF Eagle, a stand alone PDF reader for Symbian^3 devices. It has been developed by Visiarc, the same team behind the popular email solution Mobile Documents. With a sleek user interface and impressive rendering speeds it represents a substantial improvement over existing PDF solutions. If you regularly read PDF files on your phone, then PDF Eagle is a recommended download.
Nokia's old ovi.com is undergoing a butterfly-like transformation, it seems. ovi.com, as of right now, simply redirects to maps.nokia.com. The Ovi blog explains it all (quote below), but don't panic if you use a particular Ovi service, the old landing pages are still there on the server (e.g. Contacts, Music, Mail), so just bookmark these instead, if you haven't already.
Our editorial Symbian^3 phones just got v25 firmware updates over the air (OTA), a 1MB download that installed quickly and cleanly. The previous firmware for each was v22 and it's not entirely clear what's changed - I suspect merely small bug fixes and under-the-hood stability tweaks. Please comment below if you can help build a changelog.
More a super-geek plaything than a mainstream set of games at present, but I can see where Nokia is going with this... Beta Labs just released a small set of NFC games, simple titles that leverage the NFC chip in the C7 and the newer Belle devices. You'll need a compatible device (obviously) and a number of NFC chips (e.g. in cards and stickers) to play though. Video and quotes below.
It seems that Nokia Suite is now available, in beta form, at least, dubbed 'v3.2' and offering (over and above the old Ovi Suite) a new look and feel, better help, more reliable software updating, plus bug fixes and the final scrapping of the old 'MPlatform.exe' comms architecture. It's an 87MB download and there are links and quotes below.
Yes, you can turn stats to prove almost anything and goodness knows we've seen enough of that from the tech media in recent years. So time for a shot across the bows with a look at that favourite stat from the 'superphone' brigade: mobile web browsing, sorted by smartphone platform. It'll be iPhone and Android all the way, right? Wrong. Hopelessly wrong.
Alongside the Nokia 603, the Luna Bluetooth Headset has also been announced. A playful looking in-ear headset, it comes in five colours as well as being NFC enabled. In practice this makes pairing practical - just tap one of Nokia's NFC handsets to the base and you'll be paired up. Other more traditional methods of scanning the area and pairing are naturally available as the headset conforms to the 2.12 Bluetooth specification. Answering calls is a simple matter of popping the headset out the holder and into your ear.
