At IFA 2011 in Berlin, Nokia’s booth featured all the company’s latest handsets, specifically the recently announced 701, 700, and 600. On one of the 700 models at the show, a video was being looped that showed a Nokia handset we’ve never seen before. It looks like it runs Belle, the latest upgrade to Symbian, and it has NFC inside, but other than that … we can’t really say much else. No model number, no new outstanding features, the design however is simply gorgeous. It looks like it’s all glass, just like the iPhone 4, but said glass is rounded, which is something we saw with the Nokia N9 and are likely to see in the first Nokia Windows Phone. Nokia has said that they’ll be releasing 10 new Symbian handsets before finally killing the platform, and if you’ve been keeping count (the 500, 600, 700, and 701) then you know there’s just 6 left. Is the 3D render in the video below one of those last remaining devices?
Say that device does exist inside the walls of Nokia, but it doesn’t run Symbian Belle, instead it gives us a hint as to a future design language Nokia is considering on implementing across an upcoming portfolio of devices. Is such industrial design going to persuade you to give Windows Phone a try? No other hardware manufacturers seem to be giving Microsoft’s operating system their best effort, and that’s hurting the platform. When you combine Windows Phone, which is arguably a fantastic operating system, just under appreciated, with Nokia hardware, which is itself under appreciated because it has historically run Symbian, do you end up with a combination so deadly that the mobile industry isn’t going to know what hit them?
Time will tell. Note that Nokia World is coming up next month, the 26th of October, so we’re likely going to hear about several new devices at that event.