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]

Samsung Galaxy Prevail

Announced on April 4th, 2011 and scheduled to be available from Boost Mobile from April 29, 2011. The Samsung Galaxy Prevail is an Android 2.2 smartphone with 3.2-inch display. It has 2MP camera, GPS, Bluetooth, E-mail access and supports up to 32GB microSD memory cards.

HTC Sensation 4G

Announced on April 12th, 2011 and scheduled to be available from T-Mobile on Summer 2011. HTC Sensation 4G comes with Android 2.3 Gingerbread with HTC Sense UI version 3.0. It has a 1.2GHz Qualcomm dual-core processor with support for the nice 3D-like transitions in the menu like the one on HTC Flyer tablet. This phone is the first with a contoured glass 4.3-inch display which means that your Super LCD screen is set back slightly to avoid scratches. The display has a qHD (540×960) resolution with an aspect ratio of 16:9. Other specs include 8MP rear camera with dual-LED flash and 30fps full HD (1080p) resolution video recording.

Nokia E6

Announced on April 12th, 2011 and scheduled for Q2 2011. The Nokia E6 is another phone in Nokia E Series intended for business. The phone comes with the updated version of Symbian^3 called Symbian Anna powered by ARM11 processor at 680MHz speed. It has a 2.46-inches LCD capacitive touchscreen, made of Gorilla Glass to protect it from scratches. Other specs include 8MP camera with dual-LED flash capable for 720p HD video recording, GPS, Wi-Fi, FM radio, and Bluetooth.

Nokia X7

Announced at the same day with the Nokia E6 and scheduled for Q2 2011. AT&T will be one of the US carrier that will offer this phone. Together with the Nokia E6, the Nokia X7 is one of the phone that will come with Symbian Anna. The phone is equipped with a 4-inche AMOLED touchscreen with a 360×640 resolution and 8MP fixed focus camera capable for 720p HD video recording. These are powered with ARM11 processor at 680MHz.

Samsung Replenish

Announced on April 15, 2011, the Samsung Replenish is scheduled to be available from Sprint starting from May 8, 2011. Samsung Replenish is a Candybar phone with full QWERTY keyboard and a touch screen. It has 2.8-inch QVGA display, 2MP camera, Wi-Fi, GPS and Blueetooth. The phone is equipped with Qualcomm MSM7627-2 processor at 600 MHz running Android 2.2 OS.

Sony Ericsson W8 Walkman

This phone announced on April 21st, 2011 but the availability is still unknown. Sony Ericsson W8 Walkman is the first Sony Ericsson Walkman series to run Android. Physically, the phone carries the design accents of an XPERIA X8 with the addition of fresh colors. It’s powered by 600MHz processor and an Android 2.1 with Timescape. It also has a 3-inch capacitive touch display, 3.2MP camera, Wi-Fi, aGPS, FM radio and Blueetooth.

Well, that’s all we have for April 2011. If you notice there’s something we’ve missed from this list, please do not hesitate to inform us. And also, i just wonder which one of these is your favorite?

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]

It’s very important to note that Symbian is the primary platform today and will also be the primary platform in the future,” Nurmi said.

MeeGo which is a descendant of both Nokia’s Maemo and Intel’s Moblin Linux has became part of the future long term strategy for Nokia. It probably one of the most anticipated platforms to bring new excitements to Nokia smartphones. It’s been used as a netbook OS but not yet seen officially on mobile handsets as the first MeeGo device delayed to 2011.

And for the Symbian big update in the first quarter of 2011, Nokia promised to bring more supports to enterprise users including “enhanced email capabilities, security capabilities in terms of more Exchange policies being supported, and plenty more things”.

[via: ZDNet UK]

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]

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.

Rich Green, CTO of Nokia:

“We’re making strategic technology decisions that will accelerate our ability to offer the strongest possible opportunity for developers and the richest possible experience for consumers. For developers, it will open up a huge installed customer base for their applications. For consumers, it means a more compelling engagement with their Nokia product in terms of access to the best applications in the marketplace and a constantly improving product experience. We firmly believe that the choices we have made will not only mean significant opportunity and success for our developer partners, but for Nokia as well.”

Watch the interview of the Nokia’s CTO Rich Green below:

For developers this is a good step making them able to develop apps efficiently without worry about which platforms are they working on. All they need to do is to build it on Qt and deploy it whether it’s for Symbian or MeeGoo. So it’s kind of making the Qt as the OS and leave the Symbian and MeeGoo as the UIs isn’t it? Pixelpipe’s Brett Butterfireld said,

“We’re now in the process of re-creating our Symbian native UIs in Qt so will have a good story to tell. Elements of our UI that were previously taking us hours of painstaking hand coding in Symbian are now re-created in minutes with the Qt Creator. It’s not just the ease of porting our existing functionality to Qt, however the ability of adding capabilities and features beyond Symbian that has us excited.”

So what do you get as as Nokia users? Nokia promised that with all these changes, Nokia users including the current Symbian^3 users or the upcoming MeeGoo users will get more choices of applications as well as updates and upgrades to the existing platforms.

Well, this seems to be a critical decision taken by Nokia which surely will affect it’s future existence in mobile industry which is now dominated by Apple and Android. And with the launch of the Microsoft Windows Phone 7 and the update to HP webOS 2.0 and BlackBerry OS 6.0, the battle will become colossal.

[via: Nokia Press Release]