MeeGo is the new platform that comes as a result of Nokia and Intel’s partnership, announced during the Mobile World Congress this year. MeeGo combines Maemo and Moblin, and Orange was the first company to announce the usage of this platform on devices featuring Intel Atom processors.

Orange has declared that the MeeGo devices (which is a generic term that includes smartphones, tablets and netbooks) will be sold together with a series of multimedia services from the mobile carrier. Orange hasn’t announced a date yet, but Nokia and Intel had declared that the first MeeGo devices would be launched by the end of 2010.

Another interesting news about the MeeGo: Valtteri Halla from MeeGo Technical Steering Group has announced that a build for the Nokia N900 will be launched by the end of March on a testing phase. It doesn’t mean that the N900 will be updated to MeeGo, but that the developers will be able of testing the platform on the device.

We all know that Nokia is planning on launching dual SIM phones during this year. It seems, however, that some of the dual SIM devices will be based on an S40 platform, and not on Symbian.

According to the document found by Cellularmania.net, Nokia is planning on adding touchscreen to the S40 and offer a “compelling touch experience at a highly affordable price”. It seems that these devices will also feature a QWERTY keyboard.

Nokia also promises to extend the browsing capabilities of the S40, but there are no details about it. The S40 is currently one of the most used mobile platforms in the world.

With the release of Symbian ^3, with open source license during the last weeks, it seems that the work on the next OS release, the ^4 has already begun. According to the official roadmap, the OS should be completed by September 2010 and should be available on devices from the second half of 2011.

And the videos we’ll show by the end of this post show more about the Symbian ^4. Enjoy!

Intel and Nokia have come together to join the competition between Google, Apple and Microsoft when it comes to mobile Operating Systems. The two companies have merged their forces together to create a new OS, MeeGo. The first devices featuring this new OS should be seen at the second half of 2010.

MeeGo is a fusion of Nokia’s Maemo OS and Moblin, the mobile OS from Intel, both developed on Linux. Maemo is the platform currently present on the N900, while Moblin is featured on some devices such as the LG GW990, and some Acer and Foxconn netbooks. Both systems, analyzed on themselves, are still on a very primitive stage when compared to Apple’s and Google’s platforms, and that’s probably why Intel and Nokia decided to join forces.

At the current stage, the new system will be developed based on the Moblin core system, but it’ll use the Nokia Ovi Store for applications, and it’ll be managed by Lunx Foundation as an Open Source project, aiming to be developed to work on netbooks and tablets as well.

Nokia hasn’t released a phone with a 12 Megapixel photocamera yet, although the rumors claim that there is one to be launched soon in the market. People thought the Nokia N87 would have been the first model to feature that 12 Megapixel photocamera.

But according to more rumors, the 12 Megapixel photocamera phone will be called Nokia N8. The French site Tom’s Guide has revealed that the Nokia N8 (Or Nokia N8-99) will be launched during the first half ot 2010, as the first phone featuring Symbian^3.

The Nokia N8 should have a 3.5″ touchscreen display and record HD videos at 720p and an HDMI port.

One year after the announcement of the Nokia 6303 classic, the reviewed modle, the 6303i Classic is officially announced. The model is a review of the previous 6303, offering more features and different colors.

The main difference between the 6303i and the previous model is that the new model will feature 55MB of internal memory and a 2GB MicroSD included. The Nokia 6303i offers tri-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE connectivity, a 2.2″ QVGA display with 16 million colors, a 3.5mm audio jack, Bluetooth, FM radio with RDS, Web browser and 3.2 Megapixel photocamera with autofocus and LED flash.

The Nokia 6303i will be available in most markets from the first trimester of this year. The price should be around €105 without taxes.

The competition is one of the best things for clients. It generates more choices and it makes companies create new strategies in order to become competitive in the market. If nowadays the technology field doesn’t have too many options that companies can choose in order to be competitive, as most technologies are available to every company, the only other choice is on prices.

And in order to compete against Sony Ericsson and Samsung, Nokia has decided to lower the prices on their own phones. According to a press-release, the prices will be 10% lower soon. The company has decided to adopt this strategy in order to reach the mark of 458 million phones sold in 2010. According to experts, the cellphone market will have a 10% increase this year.

With a surprise move, Nokia has decided to release the GPS navigation for free with their very good product, Ovi Maps. In fact,     despite the software being pre-installed in most Nokia smartphones with GPS, up till the announcement, users needed to buy a license in order to use the vocal guide.

Available in 74 countries and 46 languages,the vocal guides for the GPS navigation are now free, the same as the maps from 180 countries. The Ovi Maps is compatible with several devices, such as: Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, Nokia N97, Nokia E72, among others, and from March 2010 on, it’ll come preinstalled in all new devices.

It didn’t take long for Nokia to confirm the rumors this time: the Firmware 40.0.005 for the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic was released, and it brings the kinetic scrolling feature to all the menus on the phone, amongst other things.

We’re still waiting on an official changelog, but we remind you all to backup the phone just for safety reasons. The update is only available for now through the Nokia Software Updater.

After the last important update for the Nokia N86 which arrived last October and implemented facial recognition, the device gets yet a new firmware. The photographic device, which has received the award of best cameraphone of 2009 from TIPA thanks to its 8 Megapixel photocamera receives a minor update. The new update is less than 700 KB heavy if downloaded directly from the smartphone.

For now we don’t know the bugfixes, but it’s always good to make a safety backup before updating the firmware. Also, another update seems to be coming for another model, the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, with a firmware that adds kinetic scrolling and other new features. The new update is currently on its testing phase and will be released soon.