While Nokia smartphones are often referred to as "Symbian smartphones" on the Web, it's slightly more complicated when taking a closer look at their smartphone portfolio. Just like the iPhone concept as a whole has been a hit recently, many of Nokia's smartphone concepts have also had great success (and still do succeed).
If you ask a random iPhone owner about their smartphone, there's a good chance they wouldn't give you an explanation that fits with a hardcore smartphone user's idea of the concept. That's exactly how it has been and still is with a large part of Nokia Nseries smartphone owners, and perhaps even more so in this crowd.
The just recently released Nokia N86 is a typical high-end Nokia smartphone, which offers the technology required to pull off most mobile related tasks in combination with a great camera and a pretty good multimedia playback experience. However, from Nokia's perspective, there's a big difference between an N8x series smartphone and an N9x series smartphone, despite the fact that both lineups have been exclusively powered by Symbian to date.
If you look at the N8x smartphones through the history, the latest and greatest camera technology Nokia has to offer has been a key here. The N9x smartphones, however, has experimented with new functionality such as a hard drive, mobile TV and GPS navigation. Of those three, GPS navigation is clearly the only technology that today has spread to most phones, while internal Flash memory and microSD memory slots has in recent years solved the storage capacity issues in most phones. Mobile TV has yet to become a widespread technology, but the recently announced Nokia 5330 Mobile TV Edition is a sign of mobile TV technology spreading throughout the Nokia portfolio at least.
Nokia usually refers to the N9x smartphones as "mobile computing devices", but at the end of the day they've usually been smartphones with a taste of mobile trends to come rather than true mobile computing devices (N97 not included, obviously). With the introduction of the Nokia N900, which is now available in Nokia's Flagship stores in the U.S., Nokia's N9x lineup has all of a sudden gotten a member that is actually a real mobile computing device though. It's simply not powered by the phone-centric Symbian OS, but a mobile computing operating system called Maemo.
If you haven't already heard of the Nokia N900 and know what it's all about, there's a good chance that this phone is not for you though. That's mainly because it's not yet really a phone, but a mobile device with phone functionality "on its way" to become seamlessly integrated. It's not yet known what the exact outcome will be.
One thing is certain though, when the next version of Maemo will be released in late 2010 or early 2011, a new interface will be introduced that'll be used on devices powered by both Symbian and Maemo. When we interviewed a Nokia spokesperson earlier this fall, it became clear that this new interface will be rolled out in part to ensure that the underlying operating system shouldn't matter to end users in the same way it does today. Whether you're using a "N900 powered Maemo" or "N86 powered by Symbian" smartphone in the future, they'll provide you pretty much the same interface and most of the same apps.
Pretty much all the model names in the Nseries has been used to date though, so there's a good chance that Nokia will come up with new lineups for the various types of high-end consumer smartphones in the future. But for now, the most important thing to know is that the N86 is focusing on camera technology, the N97 is focusing on social networks and messaging, while the N900 is on its way to seamlessly integrate phone functionality in a mobile computing OS.
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