Hasta La Gadget!

Perched behind Nokia’s head of smart devices, Jo Harlow, at a recent event in China is what appears to be a new home screen on an N8, yet more evidence — hot on the heels of the company’s MWC event — that Espoo still has plenty of love in the wings for its dead-platform-walking. Notably, it appears they’re looking at migrating key information to the top of the screen to create a dedicated status bar, which would presumably stay visible as you navigate from screen to screen — akin to most other platforms on the market — accompanied by a string of soft button icons at the bottom. Interestingly, the UI in some respects mirrors what we saw on the leaked shots of the apparently killed N9 — small black status bar and icons along the bottom — which would seem to tell us one of two things: either the N9 was a Symbian device all along, or the company had planned on standardizing UI elements between its future Symbian and MeeGo roadmaps. Either way, this looks like a nice improvement… and in all likelihood, a far cry from what we’ll see when these guys start busting out Windows Phone 7 devices.

Nokia sneaks a look at new Symbian UI during China event originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 24 Feb 2011 13:52:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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According to a study by Good Guide, iPhones are far from the top choice when it comes to picking a green cell phone.

The study looked at nearly 600 phones from 16 different manufacturers, and Nokia was the clear leader. 26 of the top 30 green phones were made by Nokia, with the C6 model coming out on top. The iPhone, meanwhile, placed in the lower half of the rankings. Not so much because of the phone itself, but because of Apple’s environmental behavior.

But Apple still fared much better than Research in Motion, the manufacturer behind the Blackberry brand. RIM was the lowest ranked company in the study.

Via USA Today

We’d raised our own concerns in interviews with both Stephen Elop and Microsoft’s Aaron Woodman in the past week that Nokia could have difficulty pushing the Windows Phone platform low enough to fill the holes left by Symbian’s departure in the bottom rungs of the market, but the Nokia CEO is making it very clear that he thinks that won’t be a problem. In a talk with Finnish journalists on Friday, Elop said that it has become “convinced” that it can hit “a very low price point” and do it “very quickly,” a strategy that will be key to converting significant swaths of Symbian market share into Windows Phone market share without losing it to other manufacturers or platforms. Of course, something tells us the leaked design concept (pictured right) doesn’t represent the types of hardware Nokia has in mind for those low price points — but no single device or market segment is going to take Espoo to the promised land here.

Nokia CEO: cheap Windows Phones can come ‘very quickly’ originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 19 Feb 2011 19:12:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Nokia’s fighting an uphill battle to retain its community of developers as it switches focus to Windows Phone and Microsoft’s Windows Phone Developer Tools from what was a joint Symbian / MeeGo smartphone strategy unified under the Qt development framework. As such, Espoo just notified its Launchpad members that they’ll be receiving about $1,000 in free hardware in the form of Nokia’s new flagship E7 QWERTY slider and a “Nokia WP7 device” just as soon as it’s available. Nokia’s also tossing in a few other incentives like free access to the next Nokia World / Nokia Developer Summit, three months free tech support for all Nokia technologies (limited to 10 tickets), a free User Experience evaluation for one app, business development assistance, and help publishing apps on the Ovi store. This is also great news for us as the chance of seeing leaked pics of that first Nokia WP7 device have just increased dramatically.

Nokia giving developers free E7 and Nokia WP7 handsets originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 18 Feb 2011 07:52:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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In an interview with Nokia VP Niklas Savander at Mobile World Congress, Phone Scoop probed a bit more on the company’s plans to rework the Windows Phone user experience — a user experience that’s been essentially closed to OEMs thus far apart from the occasional tile here or added menu item there. As we already heard from Stephen Elop, Nokia’s essentially being granted carte blanche for deep customization of the platform, though Savander says that it’s likely only to do that by pushing changes back to Microsoft for inclusion in future releases that would be available to every manufacturer, not just Nokia. What’s the logic in that? Well, he says that they don’t want to do anything to the software that would put the company at risk of getting delayed updates — not unlike what’s been happening with skinned UIs in the Android world for the past year and a half. Good call, Niklas. Meanwhile, more rapidly-deployed customizations would be relatively superficial, probably along the lines of HTC Hub if we had to guess. All told, it seems like the strategy is going to put even more pressure on Nokia to deliver differentiation and innovation on the hardware side — and to be fair, they’ve risen to that challenge plenty of times in the last decade, so let’s keep our fingers crossed.

Nokia says it can customize the heck out of Windows Phone, won’t do anything that would delay updates originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 16 Feb 2011 20:32:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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