Symbian^3 devices now come with Nokia Belle out of the box

In an official twitter feed Nokia confirmed reports that Symbian Anna powered Smartphones will now come with the Nokia Belle update pre installed. Devices which are currently shipped come with Nokia Belle in most of the regions including Turkey and India.

Earlier last year there were many unconfirmed reports that Nokia was currently shipping the N8 with Nokia Belle out of the box in some regions. Anna powered smart phones N8,C7,E7,E6,C6-01,X7 and 500 will be getting this update.However, according to the tweets of the official Nokia feed availability of the updated handsets is subject to region and stock.

There has been no official word regarding rolling out the update for existing Anna running handsets,though it is expected early next month. The functionality and simplicity of Nokia Belle won accolades immediately after being released. This move from Nokia is aimed at boosting the smartphone sales running Symbian Operating systems. Although there is no official proof, but few of the Anna powered devices will contain the revolutionary NFC technology.

In an earlier article Belle's are here.. we reviewed the features of Nokia Belle. And the success stories of Belle powered devices such as 700,701 and 603 prove the quality of a Symbian OS. The Symbian Smartphone division of Nokia is expected to produce a boost in sales. Nokia Belle is the latest version of Symbian OS yet.

    

Nokia buys Smarterphone

In a move to retain its market, Nokia has acquired  the Norwegian company Smarterphone AS,specializing in mobile operating systems. The deal was finalized last year for an undisclosed sum. The Oslo based company licenses a touchscreen Featurephone OS for budget range models. The company is known to offer the basic smartphone experience for feature phone customers.

The budget range customers have been the stronghold of Nokia for a long time. The series 40 platform has been ruling the market in the case of basic phones. Even being a decade old series 40 platform is still successful. The Finnish mobile manufacturer boasts of a wide range of platforms for mobile phones such as the Series 40,Series 60,Symbian Anna,Nokia Belle,WindowsPhone, Meego,and  Meamo. The SmarterPhone OS comes as a welcome addition to the arsenal of Nokia Operating systems. The main aim of Nokia in the acquisition is to retain  the larger base of Mid-range customers, said to be around 1 billion consumers.

The Smarterphone OS is programmed in Scheme for UI and C++ for core. The latest version is the Smarterphone OS 3.2. The Operating System comes with a handful of licences including Compal. Most notably OpenWave's V7 software. The system boast of appealing features such as the fan out radial menu and user friendly social networking. Unlike the Nokia Operating sytems the Smarterphone OS is a Closed source Software and is based on a real time kernel.

The OS is said to support most of the leading platforms including the ARM Broadcom and Qualcom. The architecture of the OS is based on model view controller desgin that ease the implementation of variations with minimal effort. 

This investment can benefit Nokia in the long run to establish a market for Budget range smartphones. The Smarterphone OS can help improve the existing Series 40 platform and take it to the next level. Nokia has already released the Asha sisters in the  60-90 Euro price range. The Asha series already has a positive response from the users. With the addition of a new operating system to the existing system, it is bound to offer a better smartphone experience within budget.

Symbian ends 2011 in style

Recently StatCounter, an online statistics tool published their analysis on the global smartphone users. The StatCounter tool is embedded on many websites which in turn tracks the browser and the operating System used. According to the statistics released, the Symbian Operating system tops the chart for the year 2011. The Symbian OS still dominates the market with over 31% of the smartphone market share. The iOS finishes second just above the android operating system.


The Symbian OS started 2011 just above the apple iOS at around 30%. The surge in the popularity of Symbian rose to around 34% during mid-June, where the iOS shows steady decline owing to constant competition and lawsuits. However, the Symbian OS saw a gradual decline halfway through 2011. The introduction of Symbian Anna brought back the stability to the Symbian Smartphones for which it is known. The hardware on the handsets and the stable operating systems saw Nokia win over many new fans. The last quarter saw the most growth in popularity of the Symbian. This was mainly due to the introduction of Symbian Belle(Currently Nokia Belle). The Nokia Belle boasted of an array of exciting new features. Naturally the new OS was made available to the existing devices which met the hardware requirement. Nokia Symbian ended the year 2011 with a strong 31% share still dominating the market.


2011 has been an excellent year for the Nokia fans with Symbian Anna and Symbian Belle both being launched. There was no doubt in the dominance of the Symbian OS, mainly due to its simple and lightweight design. Though the collaboration of Nokia and Microsoft has raised a few concerns regarding the fate of Symbian OS, we can confidently say after the statistics of 2011 Symbian is far from over. The year 2012 promises to be an exciting year for Symbian loyalists, with the Symbian Belle update being made available for Anna users.


Also 2012 marks the debut of two new operating systems the Symbian Carla and Symbian Donna. According to reports both the operating systems must be out by the second or third quarter of 2012. Let's hope they can claim many many accolades as their predecessors and help Symbian dominate the 2012 as well.