Dual Core Symbian Phones with revamped UI and “True Zoom” for 2011 (and Nokia E7 release )

Engadget reports that Nokia will be shipping Dual Core Symbian Devices next year with a revamped UI.

Well, Symbian has always been open about its roadmap. Back in February this year they mentioned this in exact detail (when they were still Symbian Foundation and Symbian^N was still the norm). Now Nokia has taken Symbian development back and Symbian will no longer have ^N nomenclature, just Symbian as we have confirmations that Symbian^3 devices will be getting the much awaited new enhancements meant for Symbian^4.

Today however in a presentation in Beijing, Gunther Kottzieper from Nokia gave some slides incidating Nokia Symbian 2011 focus areas including

• Q1 Symbian update will include over 50 features << new browser, new keyboard, draggable homescreen

Three UK Confirms Nokia E7 coming early 2011 (may still appear 2010 in other channels)

In this video sneak peak, Three UK give an overview of the Nokia E7’s new features, crowning it somehow as the new smartphone flagship.

In the video you’ll hear that Three expect the E7 to come to THEIR network early 2011. Nokia promised it will be available Dec 2010. So there’s still time for the E7 to appear on their sales port as well as come to other networks.

The E7 as you know features a fantastic QWERTY keyboard, possibly the best Nokia’s produced; a big, super bright 4″ CBD AMOLED display and a 8MP dual LED, 720p camera. I know what many are thinking and continue to think, “Man, if only the latter could have fit N8’s cam.”. Oh well, the E7 was a before Elop product where segmentation was key.

Video: Nokia E7 and HDMI-out to 110 inch screen

Like the Nokia N8, the Nokia E7 has a HDMI out. Connect up your E7 and you can show whatever is on the E7’s screen on the bigger TV or projector screen. Oddly not all phones can do this. Some can just show media if any. Nokia’s TV out gives you a portable PC like experience of hooking up to a “monitor”, whether it be the browser, the menu, music player, photos or video player.

Watching movies is particularly great since you’ve got 720p playback with Dolby Digital Plus surround sound. With the USB to Go feature, you can connect a hard drive full of media to be played back via the E7.

Here in this video you can see the E7 playing nicely with a 1080p projector over HDMI out. The projector screen here is 110 inches! That’s massive! Not as big as the record breaking N8 movie screen but more than enough for a home theatre. Dang 42″ is good enough, no? :p The video is in 1080p which better shows off the clarity of HDMI out.

Lastly, don’t forget that if your screen doesn’t have HDMI connection you have the 3.5mm TV-out. As seen in the C7, even though it lacks HDMI out, near HD quality can still be output (very high quality analogue signal).

Video: Nokia E7 Multitasking and F-Secure (with remote wipe for stolen/lost devices)

uptodateksa2 gives us another E7 hands on showing multitasking and F-Secure from Ovi Store.

As well as being an antivirus for your phone, it will also allow you to remotely wipe content from your phone if it’s lost or stolen.

Probably for some, the data is as precious as the phone itself (as if you haven’t backed up then the data is irreplaceable – worse if there’s sensitive data)

You can programme a back up number which will be sent a text message of the number if the lost/stolen phone has their SIM replaced. Reply with a code and it’ll wipe the device.

This comes with E7 by default.

Now I’d actually prefer to have it send me GPS location so I can go find the phone myself or inform the police of the asshole that’s nicked my phone (yeah still bitter about 7610 that got stolen from me :p not that 7610 had GPS..BUT if it did…)

Gallery: Early Nokia E7-00 Low Light Camera Samples appear on Flickr

Mark Guim from The Nokia Blog has found a bunch of Nokia E7-00 sample photos on Flickr. Mostly low light and mostly titled “Slutty” something or other, e.g. Slutty Chicken, Slutty Zombie and Slutty Lady Bug :o.

Low light and people moving…hmm..possibly not the best combination to show any camera potential. The images are from pre production E7-00, in low light and NOT full sized.  It’s not camera centric like the N8. No auto-focus, No Carl Zeiss, No dual LED as opposed to XENON… I think it would be better with autofocus but that was omitted to keep the E7-00 slim. For real low light (or heck any light) prowess, you should check out the Nokia N8. See these samples from Halloween. Fingers crossed it does better when lighting is more favourable.

Flickr Gallery is available here or click below to see the Gallery in case as Mark says, the flickr one is removed.
Click to see the gallery below as well as E7-00 proto 720p video which is actually quite good.

Video: Nokia E7 Speaker Test

Want to know how the speakers sound on the Nokia E7? This was difficult to test in a noisy Conference environment such as Nokia World.

uptodateksa2 has some time alone with the E7 and plays some Natalie Imbruglia and Yonas Bardouh (the latter which he says is not his taste :p).

Check out the new volume rocker on the E7 which was designed to keep the E7 trim apparently.

uptodateksa2

Nokia E7 Manual

The Nokia E7 Manual is available for you to check out.

Update: Major apologies, we have linked to the wrong file. Should be fixed now.

Download it here.

Video: Nokia E7 Hardware hands on

[YOUTUBE=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpHuKUXiWB0]

 

Here are a couple of hardware overviews of the Nokia E7 by  uptodateksa2 (you don’t see much software past the home screen stage).

The first video is in English and a similar longer video is in Arabic. You’ll see the N8 compared a little bit more on the second video.

As noted, hopefully by the 4th Quarter (Dec 2010) the E7 will be available on the market.

The E7 is:

• First Eseries touch screen (and what a fantastic 4″ CBD AMOLED at that)
• Biggest Nokia Touch screen phone
• First Eseries without Eseries specific buttons?
• Sporting the best hardware keyboard on a Nokia

[YOUTUBE=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7csTJksuTfU]

VIA uptodateksa2

Nokia E7 Scheduled Shipping Date: December 10 (2010:p)

Early today @Nokia tweeted that:

“E7 is scheduled to ship starting from Dec10. Exact availability varies country-by-country”

UPDATE: Mark at TheNokiaBlog says Dec10 Means December 2010. Not December 10 2010. So for all we know another end of the month type trick to still be within the said time frame. Like N8 shipping 3rd Quarter – at the very last day of the third quarter – though still not for sale in  many areas.

Hopefully in time for Christmas sales eh?

It’s not as quick to  release as the C7  or C6-01 but this is the first TOUCH Symbian^3 phone and the first ever TOUCH Eseries phone (with the biggest touch screen on a Nokia phone). So expect some major software tweaking to be going on behind the scenes. Hey, at least it’s not the same wait as N8.

It should be well worth the wait – absolutely stunning 4″ CBD AMOLED display, the best keyboard ever on a Nokia, Rugged N8-esque design.

Whilst we wait for the Nokia E7 here are some E7 related posts you might have missed:

• GALLERY: Red, Green and Black Nokia E7 and #NokiaWorld day 2 Agenda
• Gallery: Nokia E7 blue – How external slots should work.
• Gallery: Nokia E7 Green
• Video: Nokia E7 Hands on Demo – 4″ touch communicator.
• Video: Nokia E7 QWERTY keyboard type test – utterly awesome physical keyboard
• HD Video and Gallery: Nokia E7 Clear Black Display Outdoor sunglight visibility test. It’s bloody good that’s what!
• Gallery: Nokia N900 vs Nokia E7 – Just how much better is CBD AMOLED over TFT LCD?
• Gallery: Nokia E7 (vs Nokia N8 vs Nokia N97 vs Nokia N900)

Thanks to webby for the heads up

Video: Typing Office Documents on the proto Nokia E7 and Embeded Flash Playback on Proto Nokia E7

Here’s video 2 of some re-discovered unpublished videos of the Nokia E7.

I don’t know what I was doing here, apparently messing about in Office. Well you can see my typing on this Amazingly worked out keyboard. You can see my post about the Nokia E7 physical QWERTY here.

Copy and paste is a little cumbersome. It should pop up once highlighted text (Copy/Cut) and then when long pressed perhaps (Paste). Or at least not be buried under edit (just appear after pressing a button like on N900). N900 has another neat but geeky solution in that Ctrl+C/Ctrl+X and Ctrl+V (and various other Desktop solutions) all work.

Video Three

Here’s the Nokia E7 playing a youtube video that’s embedded at MyNokiaBlog.com – as you know not really optimized for mobile and possibly even desktop viewing as it is EXTREMELY bandwidth hungry. It even makes certain desktops I view it on hiccup on first load.

Note when they mention it’s the new web browser there may have been some confusion as to what “new” is.  I don’t know if this was just the latest Nokia Browser built, unlikely to be the new up and coming one (even in progress – I hope not anyway). It was probably not the best website to choose to demo web browsing.

Video playback – the videos played back pretty quickly and was very clear, helped by that beautiful 4″ CBD AMOLED but frames were dropped. Note this does not happen when playing youtube videos directly from youtube.com

Mmm…I can’t wait for the MeeGo tilt QWERTY. Aaaargh! Possibly the best thing N97 did was prove this form factor was fantastic.