It's been a good week for Nokia smartphone users. Not only is the Symbian Anna upadate out in the wild, but Nokia has just lifted the lid on the next update, Symbian Belle, to give us a taste of what's coming next. So what's the difference between them? Let's have a look.
We'll start with what they have in common. Symbian Belle follows on from Symbian Anna (in the same way as B follows A), and both are an update built on top of the Symbian^3 operating system, which we first saw when the Nokia N8 launched towards the end of 2010.
Symbian Belle: 10 things you need to know
Nokia has made a specific point of making both of the updates fully compatible with older handsets on the same basic platform, so Symbian^3 handsets such as the Nokia N8 and Nokia E7 have been issued with a Symbian Anna update, and will also benefit from an update to Symbian Belle too.
That will leave a single group of high-end Symbian handsets all running on the latest Symbian Belle platform within the next few months.
So what about the updates themselves? A common question we're seeing right now is which is the bigger update – Symbian Anna or Symbian Belle? Well, we say this having not had a chance to actually try out Symbian Belle yet, but it seems obvious even at this stage that it's a far more bigger step forward than Symbian Anna is, which is great news indeed.
In terms of headline improvements, Symbian Anna offers an attractive new icon design and font, a better web browser plus updates to other Nokia services, a portrait-style QWERTY keyboard and split-screen text entry.
Symbian Belle offers a doubling of the number of homescreens you can work with, the introduction of more flexible homescreen widgets in several different sizes, a wide range of NFC capabilities (though that will of course rely on your phone itself being NFC-enabled, which of the current range only the Nokia C7 is), a new status bar which takes a neat drop-down approach to notifications, dynamic real-time multitasking previews and a lock screen that shows additional detail, such as incoming messages and missed calls.
We'll have plenty of time to delve into the specifics of each of these improvements in due course, but as a whole they certainly give us a lot to look forward to.
There's no sign yet of any device-specific features being rolled out with the Symbian Belle update, as we've seen for the Nokia C7 and Nokia N8 with Symbian Anna. Time will tell, but we're certainly not complaining about what we've seen so far.
What do you make of Symbian Belle in the light of what Symbian Anna has to offer? Do you think the new features being lined up make for a bigger step forward than we've seen in Symbian Anna? Let us know what you think in the Comments!