Motorola does not support Symbian and chooses Linux for mobile phones

Mobile phone maker Motorola has claimed that they are developing all its phone features on Linux first. They also plan to continue making phones runned by Symbian OS to meet the demands of particular markets, the world’s second largest maker of mobile phones after Nokia is choosing the open source operating system Linux to run their next generation of mobile phones. Linux can be challenger to Symbian and other mobile platforms. Experts says also believe that the company is turning to Linux considering Nokia are betting on Symbian for their future smartphones.

Nokia starts shipping N73 and N93 smartphones

Nokia has begun shipping two new smartphones in its N series: the N93 and N73. Both of them run S60 Third Edition of the Symbian OS 9. Nokia describes the N93 as "the ultimate mobile device for spontaneous video recording." This device has a 3.2 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics, 3x optical zoom, etc. This smartphone supports GSM with EDGE and WCDMA. Also connectivity includes Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

Nokia has opened the first flagship store in the USA

Nokia are on Saturday checked out the full line of Nokia's products at the opening of the giant mobile phone maker's first US flagship store, complete with huge LCD and LED panels and hands-on time with cutting edge S60 devices. It was the first of four flagship stores that Nokia plans to open in the North America, and the second in the world.

Nokia E50 have been approved for US

According to the FCC report the smallest S60 smartphone Nokia E50 is ready for the US. This phone offers enterprises a cost-efficient way to extend mobility to a broader range of employees, by providing employees an access to corporate email whenever required. Also some sources have said that it has two versions - with/without the camera.

Symbian OS v.9.3 have been released

Symbian has announced of availability for developer of new version of the Symbian OS. Symbian OS v9.3 is targeted for 2.5G, 3G and HSDPA networks. There are new development tools for Symbian OS:

awareness for the Eclipse/CDT IDE framework and Nokia's Carbide.c++ Development Tools for Symbian OS v9.3 phones;

configuration tools to easily create and customise Symbian OS variants

Symbian OS v9.3 is fully backwards compatible with previous versions in the v9 family. New hardware support:

Native support for WiFi

USB 2.0 on-the-go, allowing faster device connectivity

New operator services:

HSDPA support

Introduction of IPSec for UMA service (Voice over IP)

Improved 3GPP R5 support

Native support for Push To Talk

Java JSR 248 support

And new updated statistics for Symbian – At the end of Q1 2006 70.5 million Symbian OS phones had been shipped by licensees worldwide to over 250 major network operators.

Blog about Symbian descriptors

Jo Stichbury, the author of Symbian OS Explained, is maintaining a blog which is targeted at Symbian Descriptors. This information could be very helpful to Symbian developers.

Nokia Canada gives away a bunch of camera phones to Canadian bloggers

Canada.com have published an article from National Post about this Nokia Canada initiative. Nokia Canada teams up with Matchstick, a Toronto company, to spread the message about Nokia's new camera phone through the blogging community. If the bloggers have over 400 hits a day, are young and hip and use Rogers Wireless service, they qualified for a free phone. "We believe that is one of the most honest forms of advertising out there," said Mila Mironova, brand development manager with Nokia Canada.

Nokia has released podcasting software

Nokia has released a new software for Nokia N91 music phone - a new Podcasting application. The application is mainly designed for Nokia N91, but it works on other S60 3rd Edition devices. The Nokia Podcasting application, which is still in beta, lets you subscribe, download, preview and play audio and video podcasts.

Start of shipping new Nokia phones

Nokia releases its new smartphone models 8801 and 6233. These phones support 2.5G and 3G wireless networks. The 8801 model is already available for T-Mobile customers while shipping of the Nokia 6233 phone will begin soon. 3G-phone Naokia 6233 supports UMTS/WCDMA, Nokia 8801 supports only EDGE. The 8801 phone is a slider with size 107 х 45 х 18,8 mm. It has built-in AOL, Yahoo!, MSN and ICQ messegners, radio, MP3 player and camera. The price of Nokia 8801 is about $600. Nokia 6233 has built-in 2Mpls camera and the display of the phone is 240 х 320 pixels. The retail price of the Nokia 6233 will be around $410.

CoPilot brings sat nav to Symbian S60 mobile smartphones

CoPilot Live is available for Symbian S60 phone Nokia N70. CoPilot Live turns a Symbian S60 smartphone into an easy-to-use satellite navigation system with door-to-door route calculation, turn-by-turn voice instructions and detailed street maps. It is available with the Nokia N70 through T-Mobile in the UK. I wonder if this device could help me at Agapi Beach on Crete.

World Cup in Nokia N70

T-Mobile makes an World Cup offer to its customers. It is special World Cup edition Nokia N70. This phone is a combined phone and sat device. This World Cup phone includes the official FIFA 2006 World Cup football game from EA Sports, football themed icons, ringtones, wallpaper, access to World Cup highlights and  CoPilot Live, the sat software.

Nokia N72 Starts Shipping

The simplified version of Nokia N73 smartphone named Nokia N72 is available in stores around the world. With closer look to software in this phone you can see that this is clearly the same one as in N70 smartphone. So we have here a reincarnation of the N70 with new hardware. This is great! Just look in specifications: this phone have a 2-megapixel camera, full-speed USB 2.0 and Bluetooth 2.0, RS-MMC memory cards slot, 176 x 208 pixels display. Software of the device is based on previous version of Symbian OS v8.1a and S60 2nd Edition, Feature Pack 3. Full specifications of this phone have been found on Nokia site here after a long-run browsing.

Nokia E62 is Nokia E61 smatphone without UMTS and Wi-Fi

Nokia E62 is the version of Nokia E61 smatphone for the US market. The Engadget have published descripion and the picture of this smartphone. This device clearly try to get market place of Blackberry organizers because it have onboard the QWERTY keyboard and rich PIM software.