Symbian

Analyst firm Gartner today released their latest worldwide handset sales figures, including numbers for the first quarter of 2011 from all the big manufacturers. The headlines are that total handset sales have risen 19% year-on-year, with smartphones continuing to accelerate, seeing 85% growth since the same period in 2010.

The leaked video shows glimpses of a thin, stylish looking device complete with a nice looking camera, though the few peeks at the screen seem to show Symbian Anna rather than MeeGo or Windows phone 7.

Most Nokia news stories as of late have been doom, gloom and everything in between. The Finnish handset maker has been shedding staff left and right, outsourcing development of its …

Nokia has been losing two things at alarming rates recently – market share and employees. In what is the third round of redundancies in recent memory, Nokia has announced it will be cutting loose 4,000 employees from its operations in the UK, Demark and Finland.

Nokia has not only left Symbian out in the cold, it has also closed the door to its once beloved operating system, officially ending its days as an open-source platform and taking down online distributions of it.

There’s no need for Symbian developers to go nok, nok nokia-ing on heaven’s door just yet, because Samsung plans to lure them over to a Bada life.

At today’s big Nokia / Microsoft announcement, Nokia’s ballsy new CEO Stephen Elop dished some details about the Finnish phone maker’s plans with regard to the OS future handsets will be running. Obviously, Window Phone 7 featured heavily, however more interesting were the plans for Nokia’s own platforms.

Nokia Corp.’s still-fairly-new CEO, Stephen Elop, yesterday sent an internal memo to Nokia staff laying out his views on the company’s current market position. To say it probably didn’t make easy reading for Nokia employees could be something of an understatement.

Digital security firm McAfee says the number of malicious software attacks rose by 46% last year and that hackers have started zoning in on mobile phones – specifically the popular Android and iOS platforms.

Ahh, the humble smart phone. For the first part of the last decade a mere curiosity reserved for the hardcore nerds and obsessive businessman of this world, subsequently thrust into the limelight by the iPhone, then Android, and most recently by the escalating war between the two.

It looks as though an unlikely partnership may be in the offing – Nokia Corp., whose smart phone efforts have been flagging in recent years due to the weakness of their Symbian operating system, may be looking to introduce Microsoft Corp.’s Windows Phone 7 to their range of high-end devices.

We all knew this moment was going to come sooner or later. Symbian, Nokia’s floundering mobile OS, has ruled the roost essentially forever in terms of sales (although it has been fairly absent in the mindshare stakes as of late), but that lead has been slowly crumbling as the twin forces of iOS and Android snapped at its heels. The question wasn’t if, but when, one of them would overtake it.