Posts filed under Symbian

Nokia has finally caught up with the rest of the mobiel phone world with its announcement today of Symbian^3. As you can see in the video (after the jump), Symbian^3 features everything a modern mobile OS has featured since 2007, including fast flip scrolling, multiple customizable homepages and kinetic scrolling.

It also features multi-tasking, pinch-touch zooming, HDMI support, and 2D and 3D graphics acceleration.

In short, it keeps Nokia’s head above water for the time being, but the company desperately needs some good phones to taek advantage of it.

Check the video after the jump.

Well, who’d have thought – Sony Ericsson have stolen the limelight (so far at least!) at MWC 2010. First the Xperia X10 Mini and Mini Pro, and now this – the Sony Ericsson Vivaz Pro.

We’ve already seen the Vivaz as it was announced a few weeks ago. The Vivaz is a superb Symbian-based touhcscreen phone with stunning mutlimedia features.

What the Vivaz Pro brings to the table is the addition of a physical QWERT Y keyboard. Think of it, then, as the final nail in the coffin for the much-maligned Nokia N97. In every respect the Vivaz is a better phone, and now with a better physical QWERTY keyboard, there’s no reason whatsoever to buy Nokia’s offering.

But back to the Vivaz Pro – is it any good?

Nokia will drop Symbian on its top-end N-Series phones in favour of Maemo – that’s the latest rumour flying around the tech blogosphere after a marketing manager at a Nokia N900 meet-up said yesterday that Symbian “…would not be used on N-Series between now and 2012.”

This is huge news. Nokia have spent a fortune on Symbian, both in extending the operating system, and in buying Symbian – the company – for 264 million Euros back in June 2008. To admit that Maemo will be used in its high end phones in the future is a tacit admission that Symbian has fallen behind in the smartphone race and can no longer support the kind of features that smartphone users have come to expect.

More details after the jump.