Nokia’s Facebook page has a funky countdown timer that’s set to hit zero at around 08:45 in the morning (New York time) on Wednesday, and it says “It’s time to try something new on Symbian”. The folks at Engadget noticed that the filename of said countdown timer is “belle_fb_TeaserMain”, and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to deduce that we’ll be hearing about the next version of Symbian tomorrow. We’ve already seen it in several videos thanks to a leaked copy of Belle that’s floating around the internet, and we honestly hope that what Nokia presents tomorrow is better than what’s been demoed by amateurs narrating in broken English with shaky and out of focus cameras. We’re more concerned about the timing of Belle; Anna didn’t start getting pushed out to phones until last Friday, and it was first talked about in November 2010. Following that same timeline, if Nokia shows off Bella tomorrow, are they really going to hold out on actually shipping the software until April 2012?
Software updates are a touchy subject in the mobile industry. Handset vendors, at their core, don’t really care about the devices they ship after they leave the factory. They’d rather work on selling more boxes than making sure you’ve got the latest features. Apple changed that with the iPhone because they only ship one model per year, so keeping it up to date is incredibly simple. Move on over to the Android world however, and you’ve got a serious case of fragmentation, even among the variants of one particular model since operators are in control of the software update cycle. Nokia has been fairly mediocre when it comes to updates. They take care of their highest selling devices, but don’t really add features to them, more like bug fixes. It’s better than nothing.
Any of you curious about Belle?