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Symbian has released the latest version of its Series 60 (S60) mobile phone operating system, and has added features to make it more competitive with Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android.

The fifth edition of the S60 will integrate touch screen control to new handsets, support for higher screen resolutions and a widescreen mode for viewing. Mobile internet use has also been improved, with touch scrolling of web pages and support for Adobe’s Flash Lite 3 built in. Motion control has been added, so that users can silence an incoming call by simply turning the handset upside down.

View: The full story @ vnunet

Nokia Corp. is expected to unveil a high-profile touch-screen phone, known by gadget aficionados as the "Tube," at an event on Thursday, according to industry analysts.

In launching the device, the world’s largest handset maker by shipments takes its stab at Apple Inc.’s iPhone, which set off a wave of copycat devices that attempted to emulate its sleek user interface. Nokia is the last of the major handset makers to put out a touch-screen cellphone.

"Nokia is under enormous pressure to deliver something that’s good," said Carolina Milanesi, an analyst at Gartner Inc. "People have been waiting for this for over a year now."

Full article @ The Wall Street Journal

Taking on Blackberry with corporate email 

Nokia has extended Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync support to all of its S60 mobile phones.

The move is set to help the Finnish mobile maker renew its battle for corporate email against the likes of Blackberry, which recently upped its share of the smartphone market.

Nokia also revealed that Mail for Exchange will be available as standard in all new Eseries and Nseries devices.

Provided the company is running an Exchange email server, this will allow workers to freely access their business email, calendar, contacts, tasks and company directory over a secure connection.

Read more @ theinquirer.net

From The Inquirer.

Nokia’s Internet services are far from ready and the world’s top cellphone maker is seeking further acquisitions to speed up the introduction of new services, Niklas Savander, the head of the unit, said in an interview.

Nokia bought Navteq, a U.S. digital maps firm, for $8.1 billion in July and has acquired 10 smaller firms to jump start its Internet services business as the growth in the cellphones market is set to stall.

"We’re not done," Niklas Savander told Reuters in a recent interview, when asked about further acquisitions.

Likely targets could be small companies that develop services Nokia itself plans to offer in the future, enabling the Finnish company to roll those services out faster, he said.

In an online media event later on Tuesday, Nokia will introduce The Files on Ovi service, based on the acquisition of Avvenu last year, which allows users to store files in a "cloud" of servers so that they are always accessible, an increasingly common service offered by Internet firms like Google and Yahoo.

Read more @ iht.com

Nokia on Tuesday announced it plans to acquire all of Symbian, which develops an operating system for mobile phones. The Finnish phone giant currently owns about 48 percent and will pay €264 million ($410 million) for the rest. It has received thumbs up from Sony Ericsson, Ericsson, Panasonic Mobile Communications, and Siemens, which represents about 91 percent of the Symbian shares subject to the offer, according to a statement from Nokia.
Samsung Electronics, a partial stakeholder in Symbian, hasn’t commented yet, but Nokia said it expects the company to agree to the sale. The deal doesn’t come as a surprise to Geoff Blaber, an analyst at CCS Insight. "Nokia paid out more than $250 million in Symbian license fees last year, so it makes commercial sense to buy Symbian for about $410 million, rather than keep paying what is effectively a subsidy to the other shareholders," Blaber wrote in a company blog.

View: The full story @ Infoworld

On display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from February 24 to May 12 is a nanotechnology-equipped concept mobile device.

The Morph is the result of an ongoing partnership between Nokia and the University of Cambridge, and illustrates their ideas of how future devices will look and function. It’s a multipurpose unit with context-dependent shape; so whatever its intended use may be at the time, it can be structurally modified to fit the user’s needs.

Nokia’s partnership with the University of Cambridge began in 2007 and encompasses different projects in several areas. While these initial developments come from the nanoscience center and electrical division of the engineering department at Cambridge, other groups will be included in upcoming projects.

Nokia, in typically forward-thinking fashion, said it expects certain features shown in the Morph demo to be integrated into handheld devices within seven years.

Source: BetaNews