The Nokia C6-01 has an 8 megapixel camera and a 3.2-inch AMOLED screen with all-new ClearBlack Display (CBD) technology which is said to deliver better outdoor visibility. The 3.5-inch (also AMOLED) C7 gets more memory than its family mate and a stainless steel body.  E7 features a 4″ CBD display and a slide out QWERTY keyboard that is “beautiful and all business”.

View the press release after the break:

Nokia announces powerful family of smartphones and Ovi services at Nokia World showcase; vision of location-based future brought to life

London, UK – At Nokia World, the destination for people passionate about mobility, Nokia today announced a family of smartphones powered by the all new Symbian platform which brings significant enhancements in speed and ease of use. The new devices, which are tightly integrated with enhanced Ovi services and apps, reinforce Nokia’s vision of a mobile industry that is increasingly being defined by socially connected, location-based devices and experiences.

Highlights include:

- Three new smartphones, Nokia E7, Nokia C7 and Nokia C6, which join the previously announced Nokia N8 to form a family of Symbian products. – The latest version of the Symbian platform brings more than 250 new features and improvements and retains the familiarity enjoyed by millions of smartphone users worldwide;
- Showcase of the Nokia N8, the ultimate entertainment smartphone and world’s best cameraphone;
- Availability of a richer Ovi Store experience – starting with the Nokia N8 – that includes a friendlier look and feel, and more popular and unique apps and games;
- The latest beta release of free Ovi Maps with new pedestrian and motorist features.

“Today our fight back to smartphone leadership shifts into high gear,” said Niklas Savander, Executive Vice President, Markets, Nokia. “Despite new competition, Symbian remains the most widely used smartphone platform in the world. Our new family of smartphones introduced today feature the all-new Symbian OS, rewritten to be faster, easier to use, more efficient and more developer friendly.” Savander also commented on the high level of anticipation for the Nokia N8. “Based on the level of consumer interest and the highest online pre-orders in Nokia history, we expect big things from the Nokia N8.”

A smartphone for everyone.
In addition to the Nokia N8, the new family of faster, more intuitive Symbian smartphones includes:

- Nokia C7 – beautifully crafted, sleek social networking smartphone. Get live updates from social networks such as Facebook and Twitter and keep track of new email from your Yahoo! or Gmail accounts directly on the homescreen. The Nokia C7 features a 3.5-inch AMOLED display and a stunning combination of stainless steel, glass and soft edges. Estimated retail price is EUR 335, excluding taxes and subsidies.

- Nokia C6 – the small and stylish smartphone. Sporting a 3.2-inch AMOLED display with full touch capabilities and Nokia ClearBlack technology for improved outdoor visibility, the latest Nokia C6 (C6-01) features the best of social networking and mobile entertainment in a stainless steel and glass design. Stay connected to email, access millions of tracks through Ovi Music, and download apps and games from the Ovi Store. Estimated retail price is EUR 260, excluding taxes and subsidies.

As a smartphone family, the Nokia N8, Nokia E7, Nokia C7, Nokia C6 share several similarities. All are built on the new version of Symbian, the world’s most popular smartphone platform. It strikes a balance of innovation and intuition offering a variety of improvements and features such as support for multiple homescreens, visual multitasking, gesture-based interactions and a noticeable reduction in prompts — all while presenting a familiarity that means millions of people can pick up one of Nokia’s new smartphones and instantly know how to use it. People will also discover free Ovi Maps, access to Ovi Store, messaging, social networking and other experiences that come standard across all of these smartphones.

The Nokia E7, Nokia C7 and Nokia C6 are all expected to begin shipping before the end of the year.

…with content for everyone
The new family of Symbian smartphones will include a completely updated Ovi Store experience. The new store experience is driven by a friendlier user interface and a new collections feature to quickly access popular apps and games available now, or soon, such as foursquare, Angry Birds, Need for Speed Shift and Real Golf 2011. Additionally, Ovi Store will continue to offer exclusive apps including Audiotube, Tesco and others along with favorites such as Fring, Shazam, and Asphalt 5.

For developers, the uniform Symbian platform together with the Qt development environment enables easy smartphone application creation and extensive reach.

A mobile world centered on where you are
Free access to Ovi Maps, the world’s most comprehensive walk and drive navigation, to Nokia smartphones was only the start. With the latest beta release of Ovi Maps, available for download today, people will benefit from new features and even greater map detail. Ovi Maps beta adds visibility to subways, trams and trains in 85 cities around the world, real-time traffic, safety alerts in or out of navigation mode, visibility to parking and petrol stations, and speed limit warnings. In addition, people can use the improved search capabilities and share their location immediately via text messages or email to other browser-enabled phones.

New gear for on-the-go
Nokia also showcased the Nokia Bluetooth Stereo Headset BH-905i offering an improved audio experience with active noise cancellation and a collection of five unique new Bluetooth headsets designed for a variety of needs, including hands-free multitasking, talking and navigating in the car with voice guidance.

Please visit www.nokia.com/press for press materials, including photos and product information. For more information on Nokia World 2010, please visit: http://events.nokia.com/nokiaworld.

The response has been so good that it’s exceeded Nokia’s expectations according to Anssi Vanjoki, Nokia Executive Vice President.  And the countries that top the 5 are China, Italy, UK, Germany and Spain.

It is hard to resist when you are offered a free good stuff, even you might not be using it  However, the move from Nokia can add more problems to the Navigation Device companies like TomTom and Garmin.  They were already having problems since Google released the Google Map Navigation few months ago.

Well, the fittest and strongest will survive.

The press release is after the break.

[via engadget]

New Ovi Maps with free navigation races past 1 million downloads in a week

Ovi Maps covers more than 180 countries with car and pedestrian navigation for 74 countries, in 46 languages, and traffic information for more than 10 countries. There are more than 6000 3D landmarks for 200 cities around the world. Lonely Planet and Michelin guides have information on more than 1,000 destinations globally.

Nokia hopes by open sourcing the Symbian OS, more companies will use the platform to create handsets and thus increasing the popularity of the the platform.  And eventually to get more developers to write applications for the platform and more people will buy Symbian handsets.

The smartphone market is a tough battle ground at the moment, with fierce competitors like Apple, Google, Microsoft and RIM.  With the move from Nokia, it is still unknown whether Nokia will gain back the market share.  Nevertheless, this is still a good news for many of the developers and hackers.  And eventually it will benefits the users of Symbian handsets.

Do expect more software and hacks from the community.

[via yahoo]

Nokia has just announced to offer their Ovi Maps turn-by-turn navigation software free for Nokia smartphone users.  And the offer is global.  It covers 74 countries in 46 languages — a move that should cover 20 million smartphones globally with Ovi Maps available in over 180 countries.

And it will have a big advantage over Google Maps Navigation because the maps will be store locally.  It means you do not require a data connection from your smartphone to download map data online when doing navigation.  A BIG BIG plus over Google Maps Navigation as you don’t need to pay data roaming charges when you use it overseas.

What’s more?  It has Lonely Planet Guide and Michelin Guide integrated.  And you get to update the maps free for life (at least at the moment).

Why wait, download the software for you Nokia smartphone (if you have one and it is in the supported phone list) here.

[via Engadget]

From the announcement, phones that are supported are:

Nokia E71, Nokia E63,  Nokia E66, Nokia N82, Nokia E51,  Nokia N95,  Nokia N95 8GB,  Nokia N81,  Nokia N81 8GB, Nokia E90,  Nokia N96, Nokia N85, Nokia 5320, Nokia 6210 Navigator, Nokia 6210 Classic, Nokia N78 and Nokia N79.

Skype for Symbian works over Wifi or 3G data connection and it supports:

• Free Skype-to-Skype calling
• Call phones with Skype credits or subscription
• Receive calls on your Online Number
• Instant Messaging
• Group conversations
• File sending and receiving

Go and check it out at Skype.

In the press release, Nokia outlines:

• Improve our user experience;
• Re-engineer our Symbian user interface; deliver a major product milestone before mid-year 2010, and another major product milestone before the end of 2010;
• Deliver our first Maemo 6-powered mobile computer, with an iconic user experience, in the second half of 2010;
• Significantly increase the proportion of touch and/or QWERTY devices in our smartphone portfolio;
• Scale up our Services business by expanding geographically and in partnership with more operators;
• Provide third party developers with better tools to create applications and content for our Ovi ecosystem;
• Further optimize the industry’s lowest cost end-to-end business model in Mobile Phones; and
• Continue to build on our affordable and localized services offerings for emerging market consumers.

Engadget has a video of the webcast from Nokia and it shows some of the screens from the future Symbian and Maemo devices from Nokia.  In the video, Nokia says the problem is the UI, not the OS (Symbian). Take a look after the break.

Nokia’s press release is here.

The phones comes with 35 hours of music playback, 32GB of onboard memory, 3.2 inch capacitive touch screen which is rare in Nokia’s products.  The phone will be retailed at £449 in UK, free of contract.

Nokia fans, you might want to pay attention to your local store to see whether it has arrived.

[via nokia]

The 2 retailers have started to offer their customers to exchange the Satio to other phones.  Adding to the “already bad” company’s sales performance and financial issues, the company could be facing an “unexpected” sales figures during Christmas season.  Sony Ericsson was hoping this 12 megapixels camera phone powered by Symbian will generate sales for the company before their Android based Xperia X10 hit the market next year.

Well, before you consider to buy a Satio, you might want to consider this piece of news.  Hmmm, my boss just got a Satio and I wonder whether he is facing the same issue.

[via timesonline]

(Update 2 Dec 2009) Apperantly Sony Ericsson has released a new firmware for Satio, but sales of the phone from Carphone and Phone 4U has not been resumed yet.

(Update 9 Dec 2009) It is reported that the Satio is back on sale in UK.  If you are waiting for it, it is over now.

Hey, if this is the phone you have been waiting for, wait no more.  It is now for sale from all operators in Singapore now.  All three operators (Singtel, M1 and Starhub) launch the phone on the same day (7th November).  The price?

• Singtel: SGD 298 – SGD 498
• M1: SGD338 – SGD 538
• Starhub: SGD398 – SGD698

The Nokia N97 mini comes with a 3.2 inch touch screen with resolution of 640×360, wife, HSDPA of 3.6 Mbps, GPS, 5 megapixel camera, 8 Gb internal memory, 1200mAh battery, sliding QWERTY keyboard, Symbian OS 9.4, S60 5th edition.

The recommended retail price for the phone is SGD1020.

Satio is the latest smartphone from Sony Ericsson which is based on Symbian (not UIQ).  It has a 12 megapixel camera which is among the highest.  And it has an impressive array of camera features like taking 9 pics in a second, face detection, geo tagging, xenon flash, and more.  Other features are wifi, bluetoothh, aGPS, google map, and more.

The prices (with 2 years contract)  from different operator are shown as below:

Singtel: From SGD378 to SGD728.

M1: From SGD528 to SGD 728.

Starhub: From SGD428 to SGD 728.

The RAOUL Limited Edition comes emblazoned with RAOUL’s signature stripes on an additional back cover and accessorised with a calf-skin leather pouch and matching leather dangler. And all these nicely encased in a leather-wrapped RAOUL box.
In addition, you will receive a complimentary RAOUL Gold membership with S$50 credit, which can be redeemed at your next purchase.

Preorder before 29^th October 2009* to enjoy these additional benefits:

1. S$50 Nokia voucher
2. S$50 RAOUL voucher

Go and get yours when it still there.