Nokia posts 'major' Sym... er... smartphone OS update
Belle, end of Symbian?
Nokia may be obsessed with Microsoft's Windows Phone OS, but that hasn't stopped it rolling out the latest version of its other OS, Belle, to a seven handsets.
Step forward owners of Nokia N8, E7, E6, X7, C6-01, C7 and Oro phones, you can now download Symbian - no, don't mention the 'S' word... - Nokia Belle for your gadget.
If you own a Nokia 500, the Finnish phone giant said, you'll have to wait a few more weeks for the upgrade.
Is Belle the last of its kind? It seems that way, especially now that Nokia has canned all but one future Symbian smartphones.
Nokia Belle delivers new personalisation options than before, including six home screens for all your favourite apps and services. Larger live widgets can be dropped there too.
Nokia Belle adds HD video recording at 30fps and a "visually improved" browser which enables the viewing of web videos. The menus have been simplified and a notifications bar has been added to make accessing key settings or features fast, Nokia said.
The Nokia Belle update requires your phone to be hooked up to a PC running Nokia Suite 3.3 or later. ®
COMMENTS
Nonsense
What do you think Meltemi is for? Symbian is toast. Nokia will be lucky if it survives on the crumbs of WinPho.
@AC Tuesday 7th February 2012 17:34 GMT
You are wrong. Nokia did mainly use Ti for th longest time and they still use Ti for some of their phones. The N8 was not one of them. It has Broadcomm and ST parts inside the phone. The main CPU is not a Ti OMAP part either. Some of the Ti parts are for WLAN, GPS and BT though. The GPU is from Broadcom; BCM2727. The main CPU is not a Ti part though.
WTF is going on???
OK, downloaded it to my N8 yesterday. Noticed a couple of apps are missing ("Joiku" for tethering, paid-for "recorder", Upcode to read those funny 2-dimenion barcodes and "Omat Pysäkit" - own stops - which is ideal for finding your bus route in Oulu, Tampere, Helsinki).
OK, go to download joiku lite, which can only be done with SMS, not via PC. Click link, and it says my 3G service provider (Saunalahti/Elisa) can't be found. Sure enough, it's turned itself into 'offline' mode. Reboot is the only way back. Even 'asking' it to just gives me the option of going to OFFline mode, no online online!
Upcode downloaded - via the PC - OK.
Recorder - I paid for this excellent app, worked on Anna, invisible on Belle.
So, Nokia Store, get it back from 'My Stuff'. Nope, no record of it. No longer visible on the site, either.
Fantastic translation tool's vanished, to be replaced by gTranslator which must've been written by one of those folks who can see the numbers in coloured dots psychaitratrists use. Black on dark grey, FFS?? Oh, that can't acces the network either. Reboot.
"User manual" on the phone (Knowing how crap Nokia is about those gave me a chuckle) explains nicely how to add widgets and shortcuts to the home screens, doesn't tell how to delete them! (Answer, hold shortcut for a couple of seconds, a tiny red 'x' appears for a couple of seconds. Tap that, and it vanishes. miss it by a fraction, and the damn app. you're trying to get rid of starts)
In short, if these had been fixed, and released with the N8, Elop could've saved a trip. This N8/Belle combination is superb. I'll love it more when they get the bugs out. Plus, write a decent user manual.
Oh, and stop using "Summer Trainees/Interns for useability testing. Unbelievably, they do, honestly. (I guess that's why talking on the first N-Gage made you look like you had a slab of pizza stuck to your head. Symmetrical with the skew-wiff baseball cap, I guess...
What do you think Meltemi is for?
Meltemi is a replacement for the outdated S40 platform, not for Symbian.
Symbian will die, long live Symbian
Symbian will not die now, but the name most certainly will. For various reasons this name is attached to a quite negative image, which Nokia wants to get rid of. Already with Belle Nokia is now talking about 'Nokia Belle', not 'Symbian Belle'.
Of course Symbian as platform will live on (at least for the forseeable future), as the market share is still huge, especially in Asia.
