We last looked back at Nokia’s attempt to modernize Symbian with Anna, but that was just the first step. The next was called Belle, which brought the long-lived operating system even closer to the modern design of its Android and iOS competitors. Belle brought important quality of life changes that made the interface much more pleasant and usable. However, there is no escaping that Symbian is catching up with its competitors. Let’s start with the basics and we do mean “basics”. First, the home screen got a major overhaul – you can now have up to 6 panes, up from 3 in Anna. And instead of the one-size-fits-all approach to widgets, widgets were now resizable and could be stretched or compressed to one of 5 sizes. Belle’s new home screen allows you to add and change widgets. And these were live widgets that could dynamically show messages (chat, email, and social network updates). There was an even better place for notifications to go, but we’ll get to that in a minute.
We also have to cover the app drawer, which dropped the deeply nested maze of folders for a flat approach – all shortcuts were visible, you just had to scroll to get to them. You can still add folders if you want, but you no longer feel like you’re navigating Windows 95’s Start menu. Even better, you could now place shortcuts on the home screen itself, previously you had to use shortcut widgets, which was a clumsy solution.
Then there was the notification screen. Popularized by Android manufacturers and later adopted by iOS, it was an always-accessible place that housed important switches (mobile data, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Silent) plus all the app notifications. The app switcher remained unchanged. Also, if you notice in the app drawer, some apps have a dot in their upper left corners – this indicated that an app is running.
The web browser is slightly improved from what we saw in Anna with support for kinetic scrolling (having the page follow your finger as you move around) and text reflow, which made desktop pages (which was most of the web at the time) easier to navigate on mobile to read. Full Flash support was still missing, but FlashLight 4 promised to play YouTube videos at 360p.
Nokia was an early adopter of NFC and it took it to new heights with Belle. You can tap two devices to pair them – it can be used with two phones to quickly exchange information or you can tap a phone to a pair of headphones or a Bluetooth speaker to pair them. The NFC tutorial app from Belle Anna was announced in April 2011, Belle arrived in late August. The new OS version arrived with the Nokia 600, 700 and 701, but old devices were not left behind – Symbian^3 phones were also updated (Nokia N8, E7, X7, C7, E6, C6-01 and the Oro).
The last incarnation of Symbian Belle was Feature Pack 2, which reworked the camera interface, added a video editing application, updated the browser with HTML 5 support, promised a “significantly faster” keyboard, and added Nokia Car Mode (‘ a simplified UI for the phone’s screen intended to be used in the car). Well, technically it was “Nokia Belle” at this point, as the Finns decided to drop the Symbian brand. The phones went up to 1GHz processors and even 1.3GHz in the case of the Nokia 808 PureView and were equipped with 512MB of RAM. By comparison, the first generation Anna phones had 680MHz processors and 256MB of RAM.
However, even mid-range Android phones of the era started switching to multi-core CPUs equipped with 1GB of RAM. Symbian always ran better on resource-constrained devices than Android, but Moore’s Law was still going strong and eventually new chipsets enabled new capabilities on Android, things like full Flash support and more advanced gaming.
The roadmap to the future included Symbian Carla and Donna, the former slated for late 2012/early 2013 with new widgets, a new web browser, even more NFC features and things like Dolby Surround. Donna was scheduled for late 2013/early 2014 and would have been released exclusively on phones with dual-core processors, helping to close the performance gap for Android and the other competing operating systems.
Alarming news broke on May 23, 2012, saying that Carla had been canceled. Not so, Nokia officials said a few days later, in fact Carla would be released as Belle Feature Pack 1. And there came a Feature Pack 2 as we mentioned above, but it wasn’t Donna. Donna would never be released and there were no more feature packs either. The Nokia 808 PureView became the last Symbian phone – the OS certainly went out on a high note. We can only speculate what would have been if the Finns had stuck with it and released new phones with Donna.
Source: GSMArena