Hasta La Gadget!

Some noise has been made today over the news that Nokia is going to be chatting up its Harmattan platform at May’s MeeGo conference in San Francisco, suggesting that Nokia will be releasing Harmattan devices as a precursor to its MeeGo offerings — some sort of postmortem Maemo 6 sendoff before Espoo starts to take MeeGo seriously. In reality, there’s nothing new here: it’s been known for the past year that Harmattan was happening — and it’s looking more than ever like it’s Nokia’s full-on MeeGo play, having pulled the code over from the work it had already done on Maemo 6. The abstract for the Harmattan session at the conference says that Nokia will “clarify” the relationship between the project and MeeGo proper, but at no point has Nokia skirted around the fact that Harmattan was still in the works — and with the company’s commitment to MeeGo beyond its 2011 product line a big question mark right now, we wouldn’t be surprised if Harmattan was as far into the MeeGo ecosystem as Nokia ever got.

Nokia talking homegrown ‘Harmattan’ release of MeeGo at May conference, but it’s nothing new originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 17 Mar 2011 12:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Though Terminal Mode has always been an open standard we’ve never really seen any tech companies outside of Espoo show much interest in the stuff, which lets a car mirror a phone’s display. When Nokia sort of shifted gears and signed on with Microsoft that left us wondering what would be next for the company’s infotainment efforts. Good things, as it turns out. The Car Connectivity Consortium has been founded to drive “global innovation for in-vehicle connectivity,” and both Terminal Mode and Nokia will play a big part — though a bigger part will be played by Daimler, GM, Honda, Hyundai, Toyota, and VW. They’re joined by electronics companies Alpine, LG, Panasonic, and Samsung, making us think that maybe Terminal Mode’s time has properly come. Also on the docket for the CCC is study of NFC, which will hopefully standardize the sort of awesome key interactivity BMW recently showed off.

Continue reading Car Connectivity Consortium forms to bring more smartphones to more interiors

Car Connectivity Consortium forms to bring more smartphones to more interiors originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 17 Mar 2011 08:33:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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There hasn’t always been a lot of love between Symbian devices and Macs, and while Nokia just got awful friendly with Microsoft the company is also extending something of an olive branch to the Apple community. The Nokia Software Updater for Mac just went live, more than a year after the Windows Phone 7 version, and, while it’s still in beta form, it’ll allow you to push the latest revisions of core software and apps to your device. At this point there aren’t any particular issues being reported, but the app does warn that you can brick your device if you unplug it while updating. Nothing new there, really.

Nokia Software Updater for Mac available in beta, lets you update your N79 under OS X originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 17 Mar 2011 07:07:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s no secret that Nokia’s been casting an interested eye over the tablet market and now we have a bit of extra evidence to show its intent, courtesy of the United States Patent and Trademark Office. The federal bureau has just published a design patent granted to the Finnish company for a tablet device, which was applied for on May 28th, 2010. Sadly, that date tells us what we’re looking at is most probably a shelved MeeGo machine that never made it to market rather than an upcoming world conqueror, but still, here it is for all of us to gawk at and admire. Judging by the 3.5mm headphone jack outline — which, like the rest of the dotted lines on the sketch, isn’t covered by the patent — we’re likely looking at a 9- or 10-inch slate, whose design reminds us most acutely of Nokia’s N8 phone. See more pics in the gallery below before returning to your mind cave to fantasize about what might have been… or might still be.

Update: Electronista notes that Nokia’s filed for and received the rights to a second tablet design patent, this one eschewing the N8 inspiration for a more generic shape. See it pictured after the break or at the second link below.

[Thanks, Pradeep]

Continue reading Nokia collects design patent for a tablet, evokes N8 aesthetics (update: there’s another one!)

Nokia collects design patent for a tablet, evokes N8 aesthetics (update: there’s another one!) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 15 Mar 2011 14:14:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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While Symbian might be good as dead to most Engadget readers, Nokia must continue supporting the millions of S^ wearing faithful until it can fully transition to a Windows Phone smartphone shop in 2012. So we were interested to hear Marc Driessen, Nokia Benelux product manager, spill some details about a few previously unannounced Symbian updates for 2011. As you’ll recall, S^4 as a product had been canned months ago, but the scheduled UI updates were still part of the Symbian roadmap. According to Driessen, Nokia is targeting a major UI overhaul in the fall, an update rumored to include a dedicated pull-down status bar up top; new iconography; new flexible widgets; a simplified navigation bar below; and better menus throughout that don’t require a scuba suit to navigate. While Nokia HQ won’t confirm the dates or details to us (we asked), the fall timeline does match with what we’ve heard elsewhere. Dutch site All About Phones is also reporting that a smaller update for N8 and E7 users might come as early as this summer. Of course, those owners are still waiting for the first real S^3 update that was promised for early 2011, so hopefully Nokia can squeeze in the split screen text input, portrait QWERTY, and improved browser before March is done.

Symbian UI overhaul scheduled for the fall? originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 11 Mar 2011 12:05:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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