Nokia has unveiled the N8, the first of its smartphones to use the open-source Symbian^3 operating system.
The Nokia N8, announced on Tuesday, will become available in the UK in the third quarter of 2010, with an estimated retail price of €370 (£321) before taxes and subsidies.
Symbian^3 is the first release of the Symbian OS — bought out and spun off by Nokia in 2008 — to be fully open-sourced.
However, the N8 still looks very much like recent Symbian handsets. Symbian Foundation chief Lee Williams told ZDNet UK in February that the next release, Symbian^4, will be the first to adopt a new graphical approach to the user interface. Handsets using Symbian^4 are only expected to be on shelves in the first half of 2011.
New features in Symbian^3 that were missing in its predecessors include multitouch and flick-scrolling, along with a new 2D and 3D graphics architecture.
Talkback
Nokia N8 is an amazing device and sports some of the greatest features that you can think of in a cell. I am a proud owner of this set. You can't get better than this at this price.
This phone is really a cool device to have, Symbian gives you certain feature that many other os including Android os can't provide. I purchased the set online form a site along with many freebies.