Confused by Nokia's dual-platform, Maemo 5 and S60 5th Edition smartphone choices? You're not alone. Fortunately, things are starting to become a bit more clear thanks to some loose-lipped members of Maemo's marketing team attending an official N900 meet-up in London last night. According to The Really Mobile Project, Nokia will drop S60 from all of its flagship N-series consumer devices in favor of Maemo. Apparently, Nokia has been pleasantly surprised by the enthusiastic response to the N900 OS even though the enthusiast package is not quite ready for mass-market appeal. Mind you, the transition won't be instantaneous as anyone with an N900 (and a clear mind) can attest -- the OS, services, and apps just can't compare to the mature S60 platform regardless of Maemo 5's superior user experience. As such, we'll continue to see N-Series handsets already in development pop with S60 on board alongside mass-market Maemo devices as the platform matures to the point that Nokia can make the full switch by 2012. Assuming, of course, Nokia doesn't end up adding webOS to its portfolio somewhere along the way.

Update: The Nokia Blog has what it claims is an official response from Nokia on this delicate matter. As you'd expect, Nokia says it remains "firmly committed to Symbian as our smartphone platform of choice." It then added this little gem: "Maemo is our software of choice for devices based on technology that you'd typically find inside a desktop computer. It delivers a different user experience and enables us to widen the market we can address." Perhaps you're even reading this on an ARM Cortex-A8 desktop PC right now?

[Thanks, Sockatume]

Contrary to popular belief (and reports from yesterday), it seems that Samsung actually isn't planning to ditch Symbian anytime soon -- or at least it's not prepared to tell the public. Shortly after announcing its own Bada OS, rumors began to fly that Symbian support would fade in the near future; according to a company representative speaking with Mobile Burn, however, that's simply not true. To quote:

"Samsung is an initial member of Symbian Foundation and continues to cooperate with Symbian Foundation. At the same time, Samsung supports various existing open operating systems including Symbian, Linux, Android, and Windows Mobile. To provide more choices to meet consumers' many different tastes and preferences, we will continue our 'multi-OS' strategy."

'Course, just because it's "continuing" to support Symbian doesn't mean that the hammer won't fall tomorrow, but at least for now it seems the Big S is safe from seeing one of its own jump ship. Phew.

There's solid evidence from its success on other platforms that Skyhook's unique WiFi-based positioning system makes a big difference in GPS usability on handsets -- and if you're looking for it on your Nokia, your moment has arrived. Maps Booster for S60 runs quietly in the background, augmenting the phone's built-in GPS capabilities to deliver faster, better results (theoretically, anyway) no matter what application you're using, which seems to make it a solid purchase if you spend much of your time trying to find your way through urban canyons, heavy vegetation, or some combination thereof. It'll be available early next week for $2.99.

Android is in, Windows Mobile is in (despite rumors to the contrary), and Bada is definitely in for next year, according to Samsung senior vice president Don Joo Lee. Not making the phone manufacturer's cut? Symbian. Digitimes has it from the exec that its new proprietary mobile OS will be taking the place of the Nokia-friendly platform. Hey, all the phones to end a legacy on, the Omnia HD certainly isn't a bad swan song.

Boy, we sure do love our early glimpses of pre-release hardware, and today we have not one, but two sources of purported pictures of the Sony Ericsson Kurara. Touted as a sibling to the Satio, the Kurara is mooted to have a 3.5-inch AMOLED touch-sensitive screen, 8.1 megapixel camera and, wait for it, 720p video recording. The image above seems to confirm this with a big "HD" inscription next to the camera lens, but that label is missing in the gallery below. We'll just put that inconsistency down to the extremely early samples on show, and start getting all frothed up in excitement over the possible UX inclusion on this Symbian S60 device when it starts selling in the first half of 2010.

[Via My Sony Ericsson and SlashPhone]

Read - PhonesDB
Read - Sony Ericsson Club

Right on cue, the smaller-but-just-barely N97 mini is now ready for public consumption over in Europe. Granted, we're certainly at the tail end of October, but we can't say that we caught Nokia in a lie or anything based on what was said last month in Stuttgart. You've already committed the specifications to memory and read all about firmware 2.0, so now all that's left to do is run along, fork out €450 ($667) and wonder forever if this decision will positively or negatively change the course of your life.

Nokia might be hemorrhaging smartphone marketshare to North America's meddling upstarts but it still dominates in total handsets sold worldwide. Today's news can only help that cause as Nokia taps into China's homegrown TD-SCDMA 3G marketplace for the first time. The Nokia 6788 does the honor via collaboration with China Mobile, China's (and the world's) largest mobile phone operator. The handset itself brings a 2.8-inch QVGA display, 5 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss lens and dual-LED flash, 4GB of memory plus microSD expansion, GPS, 3.5mm headset jack, and Bluetooth 2.0 EDR, all riding atop S60 3rd Edition -- not 5th as we're accustomed to seeing by now. Unfortunately, it won't start contributing to Nokia's sagging bottom-line until the end of December.

Say your phone is accidentally lost in the void of space, never to be seen or touched by a human being again. Wouldn't it be comforting to know that any alien creature coming in contact with it a hundred, a thousand, or a million years from now would be able to deduce that you come in peace? With luxury phone maker Mobiado's latest version of the Grand 350, finally, you have that option available to you. As its name suggests, the 350 Pioneer is some sort of oddly-conceived tribute to NASA's Pioneer missions that features an engraving similar to the ones launched on its early craft; it describes our solar system, Earth's orientation within it, and basically tries to let your foreign friend know that you mean no harm using diagrams alone. The out-of-this-world spec sheet doesn't end there, though: you also get a meteorite embedded behind the display's sapphire crystal and etched text on the side letting everyone know your commitment to supporting the Pioneer program in as gaudy a way as possible. The Nokia E71-based phone is limited to just 37 examples, so you'd better get in line now -- and don't forget your space suit.

[Via Mobile Phone Helpdesk]

Nokia's 5230 isn't apt to blow any minds with the likes of the HD2, Droid and XPERIA X3 on the horizon, but for those perfectly content with a touchscreen-based Symbian S60 5th Edition handset, this one sure looks purty. After dipping its toes in the FCC's expansive database just last month, a crop of new in the wild shots have surfaced to show off its 3.2-inch display (640 x 360), 2 megapixel camera, Bluetooth 2.0+EDR module and variety of colorful backs. Hit the read link for more pixels if you're so inclined, and feel free to take the "January 2010" release date in with a dose of NaCl.

[Thanks, Daniel]

Something like a year and a half ago, every camera manufacturer in the world suddenly decided that face detection was the Next Big Thing -- so naturally, cameraphones were destined to follow down that path. Given that the N86 8MP currently resides as Nokia's undisputed photographic champion, it makes sense that the company would be pushing its awesomest (is that even a word?) camera features that way -- and indeed, the just-released firmware version 20 adds face detection, red eye reduction, improved video quality, and a host of bug fixes and tweaks. Seems like a must-have update, so fire up that NSU client and go to town, won't you?

[Via All About Symbian]

One of the purely theoretical benefits of an on-device app store is that you don't need to worry about archiving and managing apps you've bought in the past -- your download and purchase histories are magically managed up in the cloud, and if you need anything again in the future, it's there waiting for you. After all, you've already bought and paid for the goods -- the least they can do is let you grab the software at your leisure, right? Well, Nokia's Ovi Store has suffered more than its fair share of growing pains as it seeks to take the unified app management strategy to S60 and Series 40, and one of the biggest pain points has been the Store's iron-clad unwillingness to let folks download their stuff a second time; that's finally being fixed, though, and it seems that the new policy has apps tied to a user's account rather than the device itself, which is exactly how it should be. Things seem to be a bit wonky at the moment -- not all content can be re-downloaded and getting the re-downloads to even work at all requires a delicate balance of "right" software and hardware -- but it's a step in the right direction.

Those drool-worthy changes in store for the N97's next firmware are nowhere to be found here, but 5800 XpressMusic owners are probably still well-advised to update to the latest release that's just hit most product codes around the globe -- including the NAM version in the States -- build 31.2.008. The two big changes here appear to be "several performance improvements" and the inclusion of Ovi Maps 3.0 with better pedestrian and in-car navigation, so if you mount up your phone as a GPS the second you set foot in your car, you've probably already started the update process before you even bothered finishing this article. It's okay, we understand.

[Via Symbian-Guru]

While Nokia wouldn't invite us to Nokia World this year, we were fortunate enough to discover a pair of its new X6 handsets on the IFA floor here in Berlin. On hand were two engineering prototypes, one of which was peeling away from its plastic shell while the other seemed less responsive to our finger-taps. Still, it's clear that the capacitive touchscreen is far more responsive to human touch than the resistive screens found on its N97, or the 5800 XpressMusic especially. This was made abundantly clear when using the on-screen keyboard although some of our swiping gestures were inexplicably ignored in other elements of the interface. But given the choice of the screen being awesome or super-awesome (remember, we're comparing it to Nokia's resistive touchscreen legacy), we'll have to settle on the former for now. Of course, underneath you've still got S60 5th, for better or worse, pumping away inside a chubby little candybar -- no screen tech can change that. See the action in the video after the break then jump into the gallery to see it sized up with a few of its S60 cousins five times removed.

Ladies and gentlemen, our long, global nightmare is over. Alright, that's a significant overstatement -- but Nokia's lack of capacitive adoption has unquestionably hurt opinion of its 5800 and N97 models, the first to use its touch-ready S60 5th Edition platform. Happily, afterdawn.com is reporting -- and we've been able to independently confirm -- that the X6 will indeed be using a capacitive display, something that we suspect will significantly improve usability if you're not interested in using a stylus (or plectrum, as the case may be) to navigate your way through the interface. For the record, Samsung's already proven that S60 5th is totally doable with capacitive tech on its i8910 HD, so we're sure Nokia's going to be able to pull this off with aplomb -- the real question might be whether this signals a wholesale abandonment of resistive across the range. Since resistive's cheaper, we wouldn't be surprised to see it continue to hang around on the low end for some time to come, but at least we've now got the choice. Sadly, it's too late to save the N900's screen -- but now that Maemo's made the bold leap into GSM telephony, maybe we'll see some worthy capacitive action the next time around.