Symbian lives! Sorta, kinda. Nokia is slowly dimming the lights on its once-dominant mobile OS, and the company's three new releases today—two smartphones and an upgrade to the Symbian OS software—don't do anything to change that reality.
The new Nokia E6 and X7 are great-looking but ultimately incremental upgrades to existing, successful Nokia phones. The E6 is a BlackBerry-like smartphone which looks like an upgrade to Nokia's super-successful E71 and E72 messaging smartphones. The killer feature here is a 640x480, 2.46-inch LCD screen—it's not an insanely high number of pixels, but it looks super-sharp on a display that small. There's also an 8-megapixel camera on the back. Symbian's power efficiency leads Nokia to promise an impressive 7.5 hours of 3G talk time on the 1500 mAh battery.
The Nokia X7 is a very close cousin to the N8, which we panned here at PCMag but which has been quite successful overseas. It's a slab-style, touchscreen phone with a 4-inch, 640x360 display and an 8-megapixel camera, designed for "entertainment."
The phones' processors show one of Symbian's strengths, and one of its flaws. Both phones use 680Mhz, ARM11 processors. In the Apple and Android world, those would be low-end parts. But because Symbian is so efficient, these processors perform well on Symbian. On the other hand, apparently Symbian can't or won't take advantage of the great leaps in processor power we've seen in the past two years.
Both phones have AT&T's and T-Mobile's 3G bands, but they're unlikely to be sold with a U.S. carrier. Rather, Nokia will probably sell them for high prices, unlocked, to cognoscenti through NokiaUSA.com.
The real impetus behind these two phones is to keep Nokia's core customers in Western Europe happy. Nokia's E-series business phones, for a while, were as de rigeur among Euroexecutives as an Italian suit. The E6 is an attempt to stop the steady flow of those executives over to BlackBerries and iPhones.
The X7 keeps Nokia in the touchscreen phone game, at least until the company's upcoming Windows Phones appear late this year or early next year. Nokia has terrific relationships with European and Asian operators and a great brand image among European and Asian consumers. So while the company's phones have been non-starters here in the US (though it's too soon to tell with T-Mobile's Nokia Astound), the most recent round of Symbian phones now accounts for 15 percent of the five million daily downloads from Nokia's Ovi app store, Nokia said.
Along with the two new phones, Nokia announced a minor upgrade to Symbian called "Symbian Anna." Like with the X7, it's hard to get excited about the innovation here unless you're a real Symbian follower. Symbian Anna adds a whole bunch of features that have long been standard on other smartphone platforms, like a portrait virtual keyboard, public transit in the maps program, icons designed for higher-res screens and an improved Web browser. Several of these advances have already been seen on the Nokia Astound for T-Mobile.
There is absolutely nothing about today's announcements that would change anyone's existing opinion of Nokia and Symbian products. If you love them, Nokia isn't totally abandoning them. If they weren't compelling before, they won't be compelling now. Nokia is just trying to keep its entire existing user base from bleeding away while the company switches to Windows Phone, and that's a real tightrope walk.