Nokia Introduce a refreshed Symbian ‘Anna’

Apart from announcing the Nokia X7 and Nokia E6 today, the Finnish giant also announced Symbian Anna, which is an update for the current Symbian^3 OS that will for one thing, get rid of the number-based Symbian naming system, and introduce a couple nice new features along the way.

According to a post on Nokia Conversations, the new features will also be brought to older devices with a firmware update to PR 2.0. Just to quickly break it down, some of the main new features are a Faster Browser, Improved Text input and Portrait Qwerty, refreshed new Icons, Improvements to the Photo Gallery and an improved version of Ovi Maps, with more things like speed improvements and bug fixes done under the hood, no doubt.

For developers, Symbian Anna features:

• Flashlite 4
• Java Runtime 2.2
• Qt Mobility 1.1 and Qt4.7.3
• Portrait Qwerty

For the rest of us, the exciting new features include:

• Instant Messaging with Microsoft Communicator Mobile, along with Email Enhancements for Business users like full meeting request support, and hardware accelerated device encryption.

• A new Enhanced Browser (version 7.3 apparently) that has various UI improvements like a new URL Entry Bar with Search integrated, an always visible Back button, and extended toolbar keys. History navigation and page loading is supposed to be much faster now, with a portrait Qwerty text input.

• An updated version of Ovi Maps (v3.06) with smarter search, Map download via Wifi, and Support for Checking into Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare or local social networks, along with the ability to share places via email or Text message.

• Updated Ovi Store (v2.06.xx) with improved search

• Updated Social  client (v1.3): With the ability to retweet, pull in status updated to contacts, high resolution image uploads and more

Unfortunately there is no release date yet for Symbian Anna (PR2.0) for older Symbian^3 devices like the Nokia N8, E7, C7 and C6-01. All we know so far is “the coming months“. After Symbian Anna though, an even bigger update is supposed to come along, revamping the entire UI and Homescreen, but that update (no doubt called Symbian Bertha [we kid, we kid]) is still a while away. More info over on The Nokia Conversations post.

So who wants to guess what the next version of Symbian is going to be named?