“People who have the latest Symbian Nokia smartphones can now update them to Nokia Belle – bringing a fresh look to their screens thanks to the latest user interface. Once you have installed Nokia Belle you will still have the same phone, but it will feel like new, with improved performance.” Love the version name.
Nice to see Nokia still “looking after” the dinosaur in the room that is Symbian, but can’t help but feel sorry for a) the devs in the Symbian arm of Nokia, b) the owners of Symbian/Maemo/Meego devices — yours truly included. Ah, the great times we once had…
Oh, and hi everyone on OSNews, a great website you have here!
I hear ya. I started getting Nokia phones with the N900, and waited and paid out the yang for the N9 64GB. Love the phones.
Hopefully there is a chance with the Lumia so far doing worse than the N9 in sales, that someone somewhere will finally pull their heads out of their butts and go back to their plan of having MeeGo on the higher end devices and Symbian on the lower end devices. They were so close to such an epic break through, then panicked at the last minute and went with Windows Phone of all things…
I doubt Nokia still has the power to come out of the hole they got into with Elop.
Fact is that both, Symbian and MeeGo, are selling way better then there Phone 7 does and yet both platforms are official announced as dead by Nokia’s Elop.
Since he did so Nokia lost half of it’s value in just a few months and since then they went from from a high profit to a deep lose. The Elop-effect[1] is very effective and it will take them years to recover. Years the competition will use to move forward.
[1] http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2011/08/coining-term-e…
It seems that everybody keeps forgetting that it is not Elop who dragged Nokia into anything. The people that ran Nokia before Elop, who coincidentally are also the people that appointed Elop, are the actual perps. They are the ones responsible for Maemo’s demise and with bringing in Elop the demise of anything related to FOSS at Nokia.
Maybe we can’t help it. Maybe everybody do love blaming Canada – or Canadian, in this case
(and “the demise of anything related to FOSS at Nokia” …I don’t know, Qt seems to be going fine, and might be the basis of the fabled post-S40 “Meltemi” – of course OTOH Nokia might as well divestiture itself from it not long from now)
The next Ubuntu release will be called the Eloping Elop, or atleast it should be…
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DevelopmentCodeNames
*N9 envy*
Watched the live stream (Singapore?) from Nokia World, introducing the N9. This was preceded by weeks of online speculation what would follow the footsteps of the spectacular N900 (still have mine running). Had Meego on a netbook, Meego CE on N900, I was all in. Then they announced M$/WP link, the price range, and finally, that Meego was a no-go. I was crushed.
After a year+ on Android, I still miss my Nokias. The OSS concept on a phone was sooo intriguing. Why Nokia, why?
There are leaked photos of a future Symbian phone which looks exactly like the Lumia 800 which in turn looks like the N9 – I wonder if Nokia will standardise on the same hardware across the board and the only differentiating being the operating system itself. If that is the future then it really opens up the question whether there is the possibility of being able to upgrade from one operating system to another – for example, to go from Windows Phone 7.5 to Meego then to Symbian then back to Meego again.
And then there are some leaked photos of supposed Android N9-lookalike; it doesn’t have to mean much, maybe at most just that this design is all the rage nowadays inside Nokia (and rightfully so)
Anyway, last I checked – at the very least WP had strict hw guidelines which included ARM Cortex, while all Symbian phones use previous-gen ARM11 (and I imagine it could require some work to “port” it over – which might be seen as too much work, with dubious utility…); generally, the hw is quite different, a lower cost one was a supposed advantage of Symbian (…and nobody really expects or demands such OS portability)
Nokia might very well standardise on the same hardware across the board (well, so called “smartphone” board at least), but I guess it would likely mean all other platforms were simply retired.
From the video, the notification pull down in “Belle” looks eerily similar to the one in CyanogenMod (wifi toggles, etc), and Android in general.
First, Apple released iOS 5 with the blatant Android notification-area pulldown, now Nokia (see the video in the link by Thom, ~2 minutes in). Not that I believe Google should sue everyone… but come on, Apple and Nokia!
I think the general consensus is that Android notifications suck least and that it is only sensible that other mobile systems copy it.
What made the situation funny with Apple was that Apple had to admit to that and copy the feature after being (and still being) stupid about copying design features. All phone systems copy one or the other feature from Symbian and you don’t see Nokia going all crybaby. Nokia has no high horse to get off from, so what’s the beef?
The really funny thing about that, is when Nokia was going around and suing people, it was over HARDWARE patents, not software patents like everyone else. Software patents are bull crap. Hardware patents actually require a lot of research and design. Software patents almost always have prior art, and are simple to engineer in multiple ways.
So I have to give credit to Nokia for not being sue happy about how something multitasks or notifications work or anything like that.
Though there are occasions when even suing over a ‘hardware’ patent is retarded, like when Atari sued Sega because they also used 9 pin joystick controllers for the Sega Master System and Sega Genesis. Atari one 9 Million from that, if I recall. One Million for every pin!
“For Whom the Belle Tolls”
Outside of the platform viability arguments, Belle looks great. It’s strange to see a good looking version of Symbian. Whoever is handling Symbian development these days seems to be doing a top-notch job.
It is a definite improvement compared to previous incarnations of Symbian. It begins to look and feel like a proper mobile OS.
Only, is it me or is the Nokia N8 speaker less loud since Belle?