Another year is now behind and Mikael Nerde, Head of Sony Ericsson (NYSE: SNE) Developer World, shares his thoughts on 2006 and his excitement about the plans for 2007.

In an interesting article, aside from other things Mikael also discusses the UIQ 3 platform. He sees it as a very strategic for Sony Ericsson, and looks forward to see what applications and solutions will be available in the months to come. No news on more UIQ 3-based devices, but as 3GSM is approaching, I’m sure we’ll see some neat phone announcements from Sony Ericsson.

At the end of the article, author promises even more value to the Sony Ericsson Developer World community and sees 2007 as a defining year for Sony Ericsson. So, let’s wait and keep our fingers crossed.

Here’s another interesting technology we could see implemented in the future phones.

Samsung announced the “world’s first” truly double-sided LCD, that can display two entirely different sets of information simultaneously on the front and back of the same screen. The 2.22-inch display is 2.6-mm thick and features a QVGA (240×320) resolution, support for 265k colors, and a 250-nit brightness on the transmissive primary screen which drops down to a weak sauce, 100-nit on the secondary reflective screen… More on Engadget Mobile.

Ring Nokia (NYSE: NOK)’s Stefan Constantinescu found the Nokia N800 Internet Tablet unboxing photos on Flickr. The new photos clearly show-off the name of the device, living no doubt that the the next Nokia’s Internet Tablet WON’T be called “870″ or “880″. No “WiMAX” or “GPR” sign on the box. Just hope it will feature a better media player than its predecessor. We’ll wait and see.

Just a quick note to wish you all the best in the year 2007. May all your wishes come true. We are so happy to have you as a reader and are looking forward to serve you even better next year. We also wish to express our gratitude to our sponsors – Sugarpipe, BlueAnt, Popular Electronics and Sysopen Digia. Having you as advertisers helped us in many ways.

If you still haven’t there, write down your plans and pursue them. With lot of work and a bit of luck we all can achieve our dreams. Stay connected. We will continue to update Symbian Watch from January 3rd.

(picture from Sony Ericsson).

Skype is already unofficially available on Symbian platform through services such as Fring, SoonR and iSkoot, with the last mentioned using the Skype branding. However, the REAL Skype client for Symbian is something we are looking forward to use.

Now, Swedish S60 Blog writes about the subject. According to them, the Swedish company Ocean Observations have been involved in developing new applications which make Skype calls possible with your cell phone. In the summer of 2005 the Stockholm based company was hired by Skype to develop a program for more advanced mobile phones that has recently started to sell in a lot larger scale then earlier…

Read the full article here. And let’s just hope this will (finally) come true.

Palm (NSDQ: PALM) OS and Windows Mobile / Pocket PC – based device owners are certainly familiar with at least one of the Astraware’s products. As a matter of fact, Astraware’s products are among the most popular software titles on the (mobile software) market today.

It’s always a good news to find out that they are preparing to enter the Symbian OS software market. According to Astraware CTO – David Oakley, the company is “taking another look” at the Symbian OS platform. In his blog post, David is mentioning both Nokia (NYSE: NOK)’s S60 and Sony Ericsson (NYSE: SNE)’s UIQ devices.

As far as I see, there are plenty of room for yet another strong developer in the Symbian ecosystem. For those of you not familiar with Astraware’s products, their titles include both games and applications and are among the best-sellers for both Palm OS and Windows Mobile platforms. And yes I’m looking forward to

Again, thanks to Ring Nokia we’ve found another story with journalist’s praise of a Nokia (NYSE: NOK) smartphone. This time it’s the CNN correspondent, Nic Robertson, who sees the Nokia N90 as “the future of live broadcast”.

According to Robertson, the usefulness of the camera phones for journalists reflects itself in the simple fact that by having them reporters no longer need a big video camera and a truck with a microwave dish in order to be first to report the news.

In the Reiter’s Mobile TV Report blog, you can read how Robertson used the N90 for three CNN videos recorded at home, in Sudan and in Iraq. Wait till he tries the N93…

Last week Samsung announced an interesting feature phone (SCH-V960) sporting what they call the “optical joystick”. In its press release, Samsung points out that the mention technology may revolutionize the way users interact with the menu and mobile handsets’ UI. Users utilize the optical joystick key by placing their finger and moving a cursor to navigate through the menu, similar to a cursor of a mouse on a PC.

Not exactly the Symbian-related news, but I found it quite interesting and would personally like to see this in some future Symbian-powered smartphones. This could come very handy in mobile web browsing.

Clyde Bentley, an associate professor at the Missouri School of Journalism, who spent 25 years in the newspaper industry and now focus on online journalism, had a chance to try out the Nokia N93.

Now, I’m sure that all you gays and gals know exactly how cool the N93 is, but this guy is a professional journalist and his take on the N93 is somewhat specific and is a nice read. Clyde’s dream scenario of the pocket journalism include a N93-like device and a portable keyboard. Here’s the link to the article (thanks to Ring Nokia for the heads-up).

BTW: Did I mention that our sponsor, Sugarpipe is offering the N93 for less than 700 bucks?

Ever wondered which phone has the best camera. To help us all out, Symbian-Freak prepared an extensive review comparing Sony Ericsson (NYSE: SNE) K800i with cameras of Nokia (NYSE: NOK) N93 and N73. For those not familiar, the K800i is CyberShot-branded Sony Ericsson’s feature phone which uses Xenon flash lite. Author is very impressed with Sony Ericsson’s camera, but at the end suggest that it is best used as an indoor shooter. Contrary to that, he argues for Nokia N73 as an outdoor shooter and N93 as an all round shooter. You can read the full article from here.

Also interesting – GSMArena has an article with photo samples taken with devices which all feature a 3 megapixel camera – Nokia N73, Samsung D900 and Sony Ericsson K800i.