It seems Nokia is looking for a new OS for its features phone range.
It has just acquired a Norway-based company Smarterphone, which is responsible for creating an OS designed to provide functionalities of a smartphone but on lower-range, lower-power handsets.
Their Smarterphone OS 3.0 offers a large number of features, customizable by the handset manufacturer, with the usual slew of multimedia, internet and social feautres that one can expect even in the lowliest of handsets nowadays.
Nokia might have switched to Windows Phone 7 exclusively for its higher-end range, however they also have a strong — on of the strongest — markets for lower-end feature phones. Windows Phone 7 may be appropriate for the higher-end phone configurations, but perhaps not the lower-end phones; which is where this acquisition could fit in. It just seems like another sign that Symbian truly is going away.
You can check out the following videos of this Smarterphone OS:
Media and Internet
Smarterphone “Radial” user interface demo
Uploading a video to facebook with Smarterphone
Here are some of the features Smarterphone prvides, according to its product page:
social media
sophisticated text entry (character recognition, predictive)
advanced web browser
advanced address book, integrating all connected services
theme switching
image viewer with thumbnail scrolling
media player for audio and video
messaging: email, MMS and SMS
JavaME applications engine
touch-screen (resistive or multi-touch capacitive)