Nokia Launches New Symbian^3 Smartphones

Nokia might not be gaining a lot of mindshare in the smartphone world with its Symbian operating system, but fact of the matter is that Symbian is still the most popular smartphone operating system in the world – by a long shot. Today, Nokia officially unveiled three new smartphones that will run the latest iteration of the mobile platform, Symbian^3.

Firs off, we have two candybar smartphones, both of the full multitouch display variety, the C6 and C7. The C6 has a 3.2″ AMOLED display with ClearBlack technology, which should give it better readability outside, while the C7 has a 3.5″ display of the same type. They can both handle 720p video recording, but the smaller screen and slightly less sexy case of the C6 makes it the cheaper variant of the two. They’re expected to ship before the end of the year.

The real gem here is the E7, a QWERTY slider phone reminiscent of the Communicators of yore. This one also packs an AMOLED display with that ClearBlack thing, but this time we’re looking at 4.0″. This is supposed to be a business-oriented phone, but I don’t care – this thing looks gorgeous no matter who Nokia intends it to be for.

They all run Symbian^3, the latest incarnation of the world’s most popular smartphone operating system – although popular might not exactly cover the state of the Symbian platform. There’s no decent hands-on yet (Engadget is working on it) so it’s hard to say how much Symbian^3 has improved compared to its predecessors.

“Today our fight back to smartphone leadership shifts into high gear,” said Niklas Savander, Executive Vice President, Markets, Nokia, “Despite new competition, Symbian remains the most widely used smartphone platform in the world. Our new family of smartphones introduced today feature the all-new Symbian OS, rewritten to be faster, easier to use, more efficient and more developer friendly.”

It’s all going to depend on the software. These three phones – and the already announced N8 with it – are all beautiful pieces of engineering, but without the software to match, they’re simply not going to win any mindshare. Let’s hope these phones don’t evoke an “I wish this thing ran Android”-kind of response.

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