Nokia Announces 3 New Smartphones

Nokia 700

With the announcement of Symbian Belle, Nokia has announced three new smartphones aimed at low to mid-rang audience.

Nokia said that all three new smartphones will boast Symbian Belle – and availability is said to be made by fourth quarter of the current year.

Nokia 700, as Nokia claims, will be world’s smallest smartphone. Nokia specifically states: “the most compact touch monoblock smartphone in the market right now”.

Despite the minimalistic outlook, Nokia 700 will sail with:

• 1GHz processor,
• 3.2-inch ClearBlack AMOLED display with Corning® Gorilla® Glass
• 2GB of user memory plus a MicroSD card slot for up to 32GB of extra storage.
• 5-megapixel full focus camera with an LED flash
• GPS
• a compass,
• Bluetooth
• FM radio
• WiFi and up to HSUPA 3G data transfers
• 7.3 hours talk-time or up to 465 hours on standby

Availability and Price: The Nokia 700 is expected to retail at around PKR 34,000 and is expected to become available in the third quarter of 2011.

Nokia 701

Nokia Introduces Symbian Belle

It seems that Nokia has been playing hard with it’s smartphone OS, that is, Symbian. Just weeks after the Symbian Anna, we have another update in hand for Symbian phones. This time it’s called Symbian Belle – weird naming convention one would say.

We know that Nokia’s long term plan is to shift all high-end smartphones to Windows platform, however, Symbian will be kept alive, till 2015 at least, for relatively lower-end devices.

Announced at an event in Hong Kong, Symbian Belle is said to incorporate significant improvements in it’s previous version, with new apps, more flexibility in customization and added with new widgets.

User interface is altogether revamped, which now more looks like Android. Built-in NFC support in Symbian Belle, that is deeply integrated into operating system, is something that Nokia is using as headlines.

The fruit of Nokia-Microsoft partnership has started surfacing as Symbian Belle will offer seamless integration with Microsoft Linc, Sharepoint, OneNote, Exchange and a new system called PowerPoint Broadcaster.

Nokia says that Symbian Belle will be available on all new/upcoming Symbian smartphones and will be made available as a free update (just like it did for Symbian Anna) for users with phones running Symbian Anna (Nokia N8, Nokia E7, Nokia C7, Nokia E6, Nokia X7 and Nokia 500), a pleasing announcement for many.

For sure, Symbian is maturing with time – but many believe it’s too late for Symbian to drag back customers from iOS or Android. Nevertheless, it’s a promising update for long time Nokia and Symbian Fans.