The famed Russian blogger Eldar Murtazin recently shared a tidbit saying that Nokia has finalized their Nokia Phones/Tablet Strategy for 2012-2013. There are couple of new devices on the list including 5-7 mid-to-high end Symbian^3 devices in 2012, Maemo 6, Windows Phone devices and Win8 tablet in 2012. Moreover, Nokia also has set a target to grab 21% of smartphone market share worldwide in 2011 and 27% of whole market share.

According to the source, more tablets from Nokia will also come in 2013 running Windows 8. However, there’s also one Maemo 6 handset expected to be released this year with the platform name described as “dead horse”. Nokia only expecting 92,000 units for this handset.

Nokia is also looking at high-end devices which are likely to be the Windows Phone, while the low and mid-tiers will come with S30, S40 Lite, S40 and S60 in the sub-€250 ($372) segment.

The most interesting thing is probably, Murtazin suggests that if the Microsoft-Nokia strategy fails within two years, Nokia plans to bring Anssi Vanjoki back on as CEO in 2013 and adopt Android for their second mobile platform.

We’re not sure where this info came from how accurate this info is. But looking at the device list, it seems to be realistic but not for the target i think.

[via: Mobile-review Forum]

Nothing special on that page at the moment. Just one welcome post from the new team says “Welcome to Symbian blog from Nokia”. Please find the full text of the welcome message below.

Welcome to Symbian blog from Nokia

This site will be the channel for technology and business ecosystem members to find further news and information on our progress towards the new Symbian.

During the past few months a lot has happened with Symbian. The Nokia N8, the first Symbian^3 smartphone, received record levels of consumer pre-orders and has been shipping for several weeks.  At Nokia World in September we launched three further Symbian^3 smartphones, of which the Nokia C6 and Nokia C7 are also already shipping. We also confirmed our expectation to sell more than 50 million Symbian^3 based devices.

On October 21, Nokia announced the focus on Qt and HTML5 for application development across both our Symbian and Meego based portfolios and our plans to deliver incremental software improvements to existing Symbian^3 based devices.

On November 8, the Symbian Foundation announced that it would be ramping down its operations to continue as a licensing entity for the existing Symbian^2 and Symbian^3 code bases. On the same day Nokia confirmed its ongoing commitment to the Symbian platform.

We plan to make the platform source code of for future incrementally improved Symbian releases available to the Symbian technology and business ecosystem. You will be able to find the platform code and details of licensing arrangements through these pages during Q1 of 2011. Until then, the Symbian Foundation will deliver historical information and the existing open source platform code via an FTP server until March 31, 2011.

During the first quarter of 2011, Nokia will review the existing platform documentation, wiki content, and platform development tools and publish relevant ones through this website.

I look forward to working with you on the new Symbian.

Petra Söderling
Head of Open Source operations
Symbian Smartphones, Nokia

The Angry Birds Seasons for Symbian is available separately with the original Angry Birds. Unfortunately for Symbian^3 this app is not free like on Android but will cost you €2.00 (incl. taxes), more expensive than the iPhone?

Well, this is the app description  of the Angry Birds Season for Symbian from Ovi store.

Angry Birds Seasons: What Everybody Wants For Christmas From now on, every season is an Angry Birds season. After the special treats of Halloween, Angry Birds Seasons returns with another gift that keeps on giving: Season ’s Greetings for the Holidays! Count down the 25 days of Christmas with Angry Birds! Frolic in the fun new levels in a snow-filled winter wonderland! A very merry Golden Egg full of holiday spirit! Angry Birds Seasons also contains 45 Halloween themed levels.

This plan was put into a slide labelled “Nokia Symbian 2011 focus areas”. Since Nokia taking over the development of the Symbian OS, they will have more control including the way they update smartphones and it’s Symbian Operating System which will be made more frequent with incremental improvements instead of big upgrades.

As for 2011, the first Symbian upgrade on Q1 will add more than 50 enhancements including a browser with a more intuitive user interface. During the second and third quarter Nokia will start revamping the Symbian UI, giving a new look and feel, a more flexible home screen, an updateable HTML5 browser and an easier software update experience.

And for the hardware, Nokia will bring more power as well as new technology to it’s line up in 2011. Although the slide didn’t mentioned any models, but the upcoming Nokia devices will have 1 GHz processor, more graphics memory and also dual-core processor smartphones. Last but not least, Nokia also plans to introduce a new technology what they called “true zoom camera” in late 2011 or early 2012 which is likely to be the optical zoom camera on Nokia’s smartphones.

[via: Yahoo]

Three weeks ago, Nokia announced that the Ovi Store has reaced 3 million downloads despite the number of apps currently available in the Ovi Store that is probably never been officially disclosed by Nokia. Another interesting fact is, that number came from 165 million Ovi users. So that means only a few percentage of Ovi users download apps from the Ovi Store.

However, there are many factors that can boost this number in the future such as the release of Symbian^3 smartphones like Nokia N8, Nokia C7 and Nokia C6-01 which are likely deal with Ovi Store stuffs. Another thing is the release of Qt Software Development Toolkit (SDK) which is claimed by Nokia can improve the speed and efficiency of creating apps for mobile devices indeed will increase the number of apps hit the Ovi Store accordingly to give more choices for Ovi users.

The last but not least, looking at the Ovi store in the last few weeks there are many popular apps also hit the Ovi Store including the famous game the Angry Birds.

[via: Nokia Blog]

We’ll wait and see what kind of preview it will be. But based on his first impression, he mentioned something like “I don’t like the device”. So is that mean that we shouldn’t expect something special about this phone?

[via: Twitter]

In addition to the Symbian^3 basically the Nokia X7-00 is said to have a polished metal body with a new angular casing design, 360×640 display and 8-megapixel camera with dual-LED flash. There’s no info regarding the display size, but seems to be matched with the Nokia E7 which is 4-inches. Moreover, it also has 450MB onboard memory with 245MB of RAM, a microUSB port, fixed battery and a 3.5mm headphone socket on the top edge.

The Nokia X7-00 seemingly intended for gaming shown by four speakers, one at each corner which is said to be “very loud”. No info about pricing and release date yet, but hopefully more info will come soon. For the moment, let’s see the video of the Nokia X7-00 below.

[via: Slashgear]

The Opera Mobile 10.1 for Symbian uses the Carakan JavaScript engine, the same engine that is used on the desktop version. Speed trials of this version show faster performance nine times than the Opera Mobile 10.0 using the SunSpider JavaScript engine.

The other new feature on this version is support for geolocation which enables web services such as maps and travel applications to detect your location in order to provide you with customized and relevant content. Moreover, you can set if and when the browser shares your location.

In addition to these new improvements, the Opera Mobile 10.1 for Symbian also comes with pioneering features from Opea including Speed Dial, tabbed browsing, Opera Link and password manager. You can also use the Opera Turbo compression to speed up your browsing speed in slow network performance.

[via: Opera]

The WordPress for Nokia supports various phones include N97 and X6. However the app is not yet available for Nokia N8-00 so far. To be able to use this app from your Nokia phone, your blog must run WordPress 2.7 or higher both for WordPress.com and self-hosted.

From the Ovi Store,

The WordPress for Nokia app is here. You can now post new posts and pages, edit existing content on your blog, manage comments, check stats and more on the go. Currently supported phones include N97 Mini and X6. Supported: WordPress 2.7 or higher (WordPress.com or self-hosted). WordPress for Nokia is an Open Source project. Both the app and the source code are free to download and use. For more information, go to http://nokia.wordpress.org

[via: Ovi Blog]

Opera claimed that this version brings several improvements including support for more devices than ever, significantly faster start-up time, improved page-load and scrolling performance especially on older devices, full support for device text input methods, improved fonts, support for copy and paste and most significantly allows users to choose their default access point which negates the need for pop-up dialog boxes.

The Native Opera Mini 5.1 beta for Symbian available for free on more than 3000 different mobile phone models. You can download it from your mobile phone at m.opera.com.