A popular YouTube channel techpinas has posted a very interesting video comparing three Symbian^3-based smartphones – the Nokia C7, the Nokia N8 and the Nokia E7. The video will help you discover what these three smartphone have in common and what their main differences are. You can also compare the design of the phones and understand which one you like most of all.

The Nokia C7 has a unique design, but for some reason many people say it’s just the simplified version of the Nokia N8. In fact, these two smartphones really have much in common, but there are things that the C7 lacks. For example, it doesn’t have an HDMI output, and its camera is 8 megapixels, not 12 as the N8’s camera. Besides, the C7 uses LED flash (and the Nokia E7, too, by the way) instead of xenon. And – one more important thing – the Nokia C7 has an NFC support. And, well, the price of the Nokia C7 is way lower than the N8’s.

On the other hand, the Nokia E7’s camera also isn’t as powerful as the N8’s, but the smartphone has some features the devices from the N series lack. First of all, it’s the full QWERTY keyboard, though the display of the E7 is a bit smaller than the one of the N8. The Nokia E7 also has a slight advantage in text messaging and working with email and Internet.

All three smartphones have built-in Ovi Maps, FM Radio, Bluetooth that supports wireless stereo headset and a MicroSD memory card slot.

So each of these three Nokia smartphones has a number of unique features. The Nokia N8’s key feature is its camera, the E7’s key features are the screen and the QWERTY keyboard, and the C7’s key features are the NFC support and the low price.

And here is the promised video (7:58):

I hope this information and the video above will help you understand which smartphone is the best choice for you.

In a blog post Nokia wrote that Symbian is “Not Open Source, just Open for Business.” Symbian OS, according to the post, will now be available under an “open and direct” model, while the code will be locked away from public.

“As we have consistently said, Nokia is making the Symbian platform available under an alternative, open and direct model, to enable us to continue working with the remaining Japanese OEMs and the relatively small community of platform development collaborators we are already working with,” the post says.

“Through these pages we are releasing source code to these collaborators, but are not maintaining Symbian as an open-source development project.”

So seems like only those parties that already collaborate with Nokia on the Symbian platform will get access to the additional Symbian development tools. Other developers have a chance to get the desired access if they are registered and approved by Nokia. “Also consistently with the announcement, we are monitoring the registrations and approving the aforementioned platform collaborators only. There is a backlog of registrations which we are processing continuously,” Nokia writes.

So the codes are locked away from “general public.” Of course, many people are unhappy with this decision and try to find out its reason. Some assume Microsoft had something to do here.

“Additionally, Nokia is committed to supporting application developers to leverage the continuing opportunity from Symbian and Qt, they can get that support, including development tools, documentation and other assistance from Forum Nokia,” the post says.

Earlier we posted information about Nokia Pure—a set of new Nokia fonts. The typeface looks really cool and stylish; it got much attention, and I am sure many people now wish to have it installed on their Nokia smartphones. So here is an easy way to do it.

First of all, download the needed files for your smartphone (for Symbian^3-based smartphones like Nokia E7, N8 or C7 you can use this source, and for the S60V3 and S60v5 smartphones (Nokia N97 mini, 5800, E72 and others) this one would do; here is one more source you might be interested in).

Just remember that these are not the official implementations of Nokia Pure, so unexpected bugs can occur. Some people have already noticed that several symbols are not recognized with these fonts installed, and some applications don’t work properly as well. But there is no need to worry; if you install the fonts and understand you don’t like or you don’t want them, you can remove them easily.

After downloading the files with the fonts, unzip them and put them into your smartphone’s memory card or mass memory (for Nokia E7). And here is a quick tutorial of what you should do next:

“[For Symbian^3 phones only, for other Symbian devices (V5,V3) use FontRouter]
Get Qt 4.7.2 binaries: Core, Webkit, Mobility
1. Make sure you have a memory card in your Symbian^3 device, use mass memory for the E7.
2. Then get any True type font you wish (should be of extension .ttf ). For example, Nokia Pure.ttf
3. Now navigate to the Resource folder in memory card’s Root (for example, if M: is memory card, navigate to M:/Resource, if it’s not there, create one)
4. Now create a Folder called Fonts in M:/Resource (So the folder path should be M:/Resource/Fonts)
5. Now this is the most important step:
Make four copies of the font you have and rename the same font to the corresponding filenames (for example, if you have Helvetica(01).ttf, rename it to nosnr60.ttf, like wise rename others to respective filenames given below)
nosnr60.ttf
nssb60.ttf
nstsb60.ttf
S60ZDIGI.ttf
6. After you have renamed to the above filenames, Copy them to the Fonts folder In M:/Resource/Fonts.
Now reboot the phone and enjoy your new fonts!”

This way of installing the new Nokia Pure fonts is very easy and fast—it’s only a matter of several minutes. If there is something you didn’t understand, you can always ask us. Or have a look at this tutorial. And this video can also be useful for you:

Source 1, source 2

In an open letter that was published a few days ago, Purnima Kochikar, head of developer relations at Nokia, assured the developers that Nokia intends to sell Smartphones running Symbian software even after the Finnish devices based on Windows Phone are released.

“We will be selling (Symbian) devices long after Windows Phone devices from Nokia have already started to appear,” Purnima Kochikar said in the letter.

As for the Nokia products that will operate on Microsoft OS, the first examples of them will appear only in 2012.

Let me remind you that in February Nokia and Microsoft announced the signing of a cooperation agreement, according to which the Finnish company chooses Windows Phone as the main operating system for its smartphones, and some people were concerned that Nokia will stop producing Symbians.

Unfortunately, Kochikar didn’t mention how long Nokia is going to continue producing Symbian-based devices, but analysts believe that the Finnish company will continue offering smartphones running Symbian during the next few years at least.

Kochikar also said that Nokia’s new smartphones will have better hardware characteristics. In particular, they will receive a 1 GHz processor, which is already good news. I guess you already know that at the moment, even the flagship products of Nokia (such as the N8 and E7) operate with processors with a frequency of 680 MHz, while the competitor companies started using much more productive solutions more than a year ago.

Kochikar also noted that the company has already adopted the line of Symbian-based products for 2011-2012. “Over the past weeks we have been evaluating our Symbian roadmap and now feel confident we will have a strong portfolio of new products during our transition period — i.e. 2011 and 2012,” Kochikar said.

Source

It seems failures don’t leave Nokia; the Nokia N8 that is company’s flagship should bring some success to them, and Nokia announced they are going to sell 150 million Symbian-powered handsets in the coming years, before they would switch to Windows Phone finally. But several days ago it became clear those Nokia N8 smartphones that were produced in December have some display problems.

The statement was made by Russian tech analyst Eldar Murtazin on its Twitter account quoting an internal Nokia service bulletin’s information. The issues refer not only to the Nokia N8, but also to the Nokia C7 that might be launched soon via T-Mobile with an affordable price. All these phones produced in December would require a complete replace of screens.

That’s a great problem for Nokia as it has been going to drop anchors in the US. For this deal the company even dropped the Nokia N8’s price to $329, though the green N8s were available for this price just until today. But one of the most favorite smartphones is the iPhone 4, I am not talking about Android-based devices that are going to be more and more popular statewide.

So we can assume this is a result of rush, as I don’t think Nokia would be so impatient to its trump and put it under strike such awkward situation.

I’ll want to know whether our readers have been suffered of this deal, and if it is what they think about it.

Source

The New Year will hopefully be chock-full of Nokia smartphone novelties.
Nokia wisely missed CES 2011 (I consider this to be a wise decision so that its products did not get lost among the army of Android handsets) and decided to present its novelties in February, during the exhibition MWC 2011.

As reported by various sources, the company is set to roll out Nokia E6 and Nokia X7 Symbian smartphones as well as the first MeeGo based handset.

Probably many of you are already aware that the model Nokia N9 will be the Finnish manufacturer’s first smartphone to feature Nokia’s new operating system MeeGo, the Linux-based platform which  was born from the merger of the two projects Maemo (Nokia) and Moblin (the Intel weblog software).

The presentation of the device is scheduled for the next month, although the company has not still released any official confirmation about the rumors circulating in recent weeks.

Recent rumors have already provided us with some information on technical specifications of the highly anticipated Nokia N9. The Smartphone is rumored to support the standard Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, USB and DLNA connectivities.  It is also supposed to be packed a 12 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics ,feature a 4.3 inch CBD screen with 960 x 480 pixels resolution and powered with a 1.2GHz Snapdragon processor.

The Nokia N9 promises to be one of the most interesting and expected novelty of the smartphone market and we can’t wait to welcome it.

SportsTracker for Symbian, an application that provides valuable support to all sport enthusiasts, gets a major update and goes on to the version 4.1. This app turns your smartphone into a GPS-computer tracking a lot of indicators: the number of calories burned, distance covered, time, speed, and more info.

The updated Sports Tracker is available for both the Client and the Web Service. To get the latest version of the app on your handset,  you should launch the Sports Tracker, click ‘Accept’ and the download will activate automatically or you can simply head over to the  Ovi Store.

Updates to the mobile app:

• heart rate data added to GPX export
• heart rate zone calculation fix

Fixes to the web service:

• bug fix: map type selection (map, satellite, hybrid, terrain) was not persistent from session to session
• bug fix: GPS import with heart rate data, max heart rate was 1 bpm too high
• bug fix: extra front page map loading removed when logging in
• bug fix: fixes to comments editing
• other minor tweaks

Stay in shape, stay with the Sports Tracker

Another piece of news for the Nokia audience!

The company Nokia has just made its contribution in the preservation of the environment coming up with its eco-friendly gadgets that are the  most are harmless to the environment. The eco-friendly versions of the smartphones Nokia C7 and the Nokia N8 have been announced.
These eco-friendly versions of devices include an eco apps folder that contains “green” games and applications from third-party developers.

The appearance and materials used for the devices remain the same; changes will mainly affect the packaging which will be 100% recycled.
A user’s manuals will be posted only on a single page thus saving up to 95% of paper.

Initially the green gadgets will be unleashed in Spain via Movistar-Telefonica.

Although in a short while countries like UK, Germany, Argentina will be able to host them too!

Today we are coming up with some more statistics on the Ovi Store especially for Nokia audience.

Nokia’ s official Ovi Store is developing rapidly and becoming increasingly popular among users. Today the company announced 3 million daily downloads result.  This is, without doubt, excellent news for both developers and owners, as every day Ovi Store is updated and stoked up with more and more apps.

Available in over 190 countries around the world, service Nokia Ovi Store continues to gain popularity. Nokia assigns this success to the availability of its first Symbian^3 handset, the N8.

The Finnish company said that on a daily basis in its app store 3 million programs are downloaded. Of course, this figure is not comparable with 10 million downloads from App Store of Apple, but this is a significant achievement.

Currently, the total number of Ovi users exceeds 165 million people from over 190 countries, and this is not the end point. Every day the number increases by 250,000 new users , while 19% of visitors to Ovi Store end up downloading. The most popular applications have become Q Torch, Angry Birds and EA Need for Speed Shift HD.

Nokia N8 is the first smart phone with the Symbian ^ 3 operating system. It was introduced in April 2010. After six months of waiting it was finally launched in the US, now it is at NZ. Nokia’s N8 will be available via Vodafone on November 19. The outright price of the phone will be $999. Apart from Vodafone the Telecom will also supply Nokia N8.

Meanwhile we can take a look at some US reviews on Nokia N8.
US PC World thought Symbian 3 was “no rival ” for Apple’s iOS or Google’s Android. Regarding the N8′s 680MHz processor it was said to be a bit weak as compared to 1GHz smartphones.

However the users were happy with the N8′s muldimedia capabilities, free Ovi maps, and of course we cannot forget to mention its high end 12 megapixel camera.

Wait for Nokia N8 in November!