Symbian

MoreMagic Solutions, a provider of mobile commerce and financial services, launched a new application for smartphones eTopUpOnline. The software is available for all mobile platforms including Blackberry, Android, iPhone and Symbian.

eTopUpOnline service allows customers to load money to their mobile phones or those of their relatives or friends. Apart from the website the top-up service is also available from over 150,000 retail stores around the world.

The launch of new handsets by HTC overshadowed that of Nokia who announced this week two new Symbian based models. HTC unveiled its HTC Sensation that features a great library of movie and TV shows via a wide screen and with a fast 1.2GHz processor.

This week Nokia launched two new models on an updated Symbian platform that features new icons, better text input, faster Internet browsing and a refreshed Ovi Maps application.

Today Nokia unveiled two new smartphone models on a new version of its Symbian software platform. According to the official statement the new models the E6 and the X7 will come later this quarter priced at 340 euros ($491.6) and 380 euros respectively excluding subsidies and taxes.

Stephen Elop, Nokia’s new CEO, said earlier in February that Symbian software is not good for the company adding that the company would instead use Microsoft Corp's unproven software as its primary platform.

Google Android has overpassed Nokia’s Symbian platform as the most popular smartphone operating system in the last quarter of 2010. According to the stats provided by a research firm Canalys phonemakers sold 32.9 million Android-equipped phones in the last quarter, roughly seven times more than a year ago, compared with Symbian's sales of 31 million.

According to Russian tech blogger Eldar Murtazin the two companies Nokia and Microsoft are in talks over an alliance to make Nokia-branded phones on Windows Phone 7 operating system.

Murtazin reported that Nokia secretly met with Microsoft over the past month for discussing expanded cooperation. The blogger speculates that this is not a cooperation based on better Microsoft Office products for Nokia phones, but about creating a whole line of Nokia-branded smartphones running the Windows Phone 7 mobile operating system.

Nokia Oyj announced it would assume full control of Symbian platform returning management of the operating system it had previously given to the open source community. This week the Finnish handset maker made a statement that it would take care of Symbian platform development from April 2011 onwards, while the cross-industry Symbian Foundation will in the future take care of only licensing of the software.

Sony Ericsson will no longer make handsets supporting Symbian platform, the company confirmed this week.

“We have no plans for the time being to develop any new products to the Symbian Foundation standard or operating system,” Aldo Liguori, a spokesman for the London-based company, said by telephone to Bloomberg.

Sony Ericsson made some Symbian handsets but along with the whole industry it is moving to Android.

“We have made a significant shift to support Android,” Chief Creation Officer Rikko Sakaguchi said in July.

Smartphones are increasingly getting infected with different kind of malware and now they are even involved into botnets, as latest reports show.

Nokia has approached Russian authorities to help return its prototype of an upcoming N8 mobile phone model. Nokia says that an unauthorized model of a future phone was wrote about and photographed on a Russian phone review site Mobile Review by Eldar Murtazin.

Earlier in April Murtazin wrote a brief blog post, in Russian, on the Mobile Review site that included photos of the N8. The N8, which will be the first phone to run the first open-source version of Symbian, isn't yet available.

Microsoft browser plug-in Silverlight has been released for Symbian mobile phones from Nokia while the Redmond hasn’t yet released the full Silverlight version for Windows phones.

Now the plug-in is available from Nokia's Ovi store for fifth-edition Nokia S60 devices such as Nokia 5800 XpressMusic and N97.

With Silverlight on their handsets users may view view video and listen to music inside the browser. Nokia called the port a "challenge" but said it: "Lays the foundation for bringing Silverlight to any other mobile platforms in future."

New research from Appcelerator firm shows that Android enjoys high popularity along with iPhone among US app developers and in some positions Android even gains ground on the Cupertino OS. The mobile developers survey found that 90% of 2,733 polled programmers were ‘very interested’ in creating apps for iPhone while 81% were ‘very interested’ to create applications for Android.

Nokia which started in the 19th century as a rubber works is now most popular for its mobile phones that cover majority of the markets with an offering ranging from ultra low-cost phones to high-end smartphones with the latest "must-have" technology.

However, now the company is consolidating its phone fleet with only 22 models released in the first half of 2010 compared to roughly 35 in the latter half of 2009. And as described by Asia Pacific head of marketing, Will Harris, the company is "a business in transition".

AVG, a security firm, warns mobile phone users about the danger of increasingly advanced attacks as cybercriminals find ways to exploit the platform. Smartphone users won’t see mass software attacks from traditional PC malware such as viruses and worms. Instead, as more of us use these devices for tasks such as online banking and as social networking hubs, loggers and spyware hidden in must-have apps, and able to steal personal information, are far more likely.

 Nokia Oyj plans to install Linux software on just one new smartphone next year, a source told Reuters on Monday, dampening prospects of a quick makeover of the Finnish group's struggling product line-up.

But a spokesman said the world's biggest handset maker had no plans to sell its manufacturing plants, clarifying earlier comments by an executive in the run-up to the firm's strategy update on Wednesday.

 The Internet brings more rumors about Nokia’s potential decline of the now used Symbian platform on its N-series smartphones. At an event in London last night, unnamed members of the “Maemo marketing team” allegedly told blog The Really Mobile Project that Nokia plans to substitute Symbian for Maemo on N-series devices such as the N900 by 2012.

According to the latest gossips Maemo representatives have allegedly confirmed that N-series Nokias will soon lose Symbian. The shift will likely be gradual.