Screenshots: Nokia Belle Refresh for Nokia N8 and Co
To follow up on news that N8 and other first gen S^3 would get some form of Belle FP1/FP2, well here are some screenshots of that supposed Belle refresh.
It’s not quite the same. It has many of the elements though it’s missing others, such as activities and notifications bit on the drop down status bar.
Source: UnleashThePhones
Cheers Prashant for the tip!
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The widgets we already have. The new browser is not an argument. We want a complete Qt-OS
Yup, widgets do not constitute a refresh.
Now, the new camera UI from the 808 would be *very* welcome.
Wow as expected
But QT is disappointing here
Opera Mobile browser updated, : http://www.smartphonecity.in/2012/05/opera-mobile-v12002256-apac-signed.html
I’ve been on 12.00.2254 for what seems like ages, .2256 won’t be much of an update.
Just as I expected, no UI overhaul. They are leaving out the most important part, pushing out some extremely weak and lame excuses, introducing fragmentation in Symbian^3 where it’s neither necessary nor useful. Carbide themes are now an issue as well as apps that now need to cope for both, since Nokia doesn’t update our SysAP and notification framework.
We are asking for so little, yet they are to lazy or make questionable business decisions.
Thank you Nokia for an update which brings back functionality that you were never allowed to take away in the first place!
Cheers
At this point I’ll just raise a middle finger to Nokia for making this joke of an update
They could have shoehorned Belle FP1 on the older devices but they didn’t. Instead we get some widgets which were leaked months ago. There’s still no new email notification via the dropdown menu and the notifications system since 2010!
How hard could it have been to fix all these little things, Nokia? Or in this case, it seems like even the smallest things are impossible.
well nokia did fire everyone and send them off to Accenture which took up 1 year for reorganizing etc
This is indeed sad news, just like Moritz said, fragmentation in the UI will lead to a weaker output when it comes to themes. I’m experiencing that exact fragmentation already when developing themes for (and just) nothing else than Belle as FP1 introduces quite a lot of UI changes that I had hoped FP1 for gen1 devices would follow.
This is truly a platform where you (Nokia) build new things on top of crippled elements.
As for you Qt fans, nothing in the OS UI is QT, let me warn you. Or if it is, I’m surprised (and sorry) because they still use the same old SVG layout style. For example, the new Options menu is simply 2 layers of SVG elements that make it look like the other menus.
But for me, personally, it’s a shame because I had (still have, but apparently only for gen2 Belle FP1) a theme that would cause some sensation.
Is there a hardware reason to why the elements are not introduced? Just asking.
No, there is not, how could there!? The new UI elements are less RAM consuming, as they are less complex, fewer 9pieces and the Notifications moved to the top and the improved dropdownbar are nothing that the first gen hardware can’t handle. That simply is rubbish! I really hope they’ll be clever enough and pack this into one update for the first gens…
I see this as a desperate measure, forcing N8 owners go for 808 not only for its camera but also for “new and improved” UI. Quite lame from Nokia.
Here’s hoping Meltemi will be a platform to ensure Qt’s survival. I really don’t give a damn about the underlying OS as long as it’s fast and efficient. It’s the UI that matters most and if QML can run on Meltemi, then Symbian’s death couldn’t come sooner.
screens looks like modified version of Taylor’s
last leak
nothing new
@Jay: have You got any info about canceling symbian Carla/Donna ? [ gsmarena put this yesterday: http://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_cancels_symbian_carla_according_to_nokia_official-news-4287.php ]
FP1 you saw is Carla
FP2 then is Donna
Why change the name to something else again after all the branding went into Belle!? If you compare the features FP1 brings and FP2 is supposed to bring, the match the Carla/Donna roadmap that leaked on the photo back then, minus the multicore and highres screen support!
@MoritzJT
well said bro
Yep, Nokia Belle would be a good idea for branding. Matching with the asha and lumia line of devices.
ffs, please, stop that. Symbian core ALWAYS had support for multi-core and high-res. Up to this year they were adapting all the core apps of S60 to run on ST-Ericsson U8500. Sadly, seems that that HW platform got a final no-go recently, as its devs are now in search of a new job
Hey, I’m the last one to say that, I should have expressed that better! I only meant to say, that we’ll not see any Symbian phones that really make use of these features known as of now!
I thought it was more like Carla was split to FP1 and FP2 with FP2 perhaps receiving some of the updates originally intended for Donna, which was canceled with the dual core Symbian phones.
donnas cancelled? wth -_-
I guess the 808 will be my last nokia phone
Yeap it should be like that but now it seems that nokia/Elop once again changed their mind.
it wont help in selling 8o8…
supposedly Nokia denied the source article of the gsmarena story here http://www.tietoviikko.fi/kaikki_uutiset/nokia+kiistaa+huhut+symbiantuen+loppumisesta/a810777
It just says that Fiorino’s comments were taken out of context and Nokia is commited to supporting Symbian until 2016. Which, I might add, can still mean anything. It does say that future updates will be announced in the coming weeks, but who knows what that means.
What do you guys expect? Symbian is dead. N8′s hardware is outdated. You can’t expect it to turn out exactly as that of the latest gen Symbian phones.
DUDEEEE Stop it, yes N8′s hardware is outdated! That’s a problem for quite a few games and ‘might’ turn out to be of an issue should we pack crappily coded QML interfaces for the core apps without repartitioning the core and ROM drives. Nokia though doesn’t code crappily in QML and on top of that all the FP1 important UI changes are still purged AVKON elemets, that are even lighter than before!
The N8 has older hardware, but the newer hardware ain’t necessary for those changes! That’s what troubles us! We don’t get it even though we could!
I’m not sure what people are expecting, whatever the company make, they will moan. What do you want more??? Thanks GOD they are still supporting you, what is the % of people who flash their phones?? 0.00001%??? It’s a good update, if you’re a geek then that’s good but 99.99%%%% of people are NOT, so they wait the official updates from the company.
BE REAL MATES!!
i agree with u guys….
even my friend’s N8 still anna & he didn’t know what belle is
That’s why Symbian was doomed. It was targeted for geeks and even some of the geeks turned their attention towards other platforms better suited for their needs.
The biggest reason for the downtrend of the Symbian was just that. There were better platforms and Symbian was just too outdated. There were so many issues with the Symbian. Some of the downfall happened because there were limited amount of new released models in 2011 but even that had very little influence on that.
Yep and I think one more reason why the belle phones didn’t get too many sales is because of the lack of promotion. I mean Nokia never really put too much effort in advertising 701, 700, and 603.
That’s just the way Nokia works and has been working for years. Their attitude towards everything is more like ON/OFF and they just can’t see anything between. When Nokia had some success with the Symbian, they were afraid that Maemo would succeed because it would compete with the Symbian OS. Now they go ON with the Lumia and OFF with the Symbian.
This has actually nothing to do with the management changes or Elop. It’s just the Nokia way of handling everything that matters.
Before this they had these strange names for new software versions. The OS was called Symbian, but then there was 3rd edition, FPwhatever and other strange naming conventions. Then someone had this crazy idea of giving names for the upgrades and after a while that confused everyone even more. Trying to hide the name of the OS, Symbian, was a complete failure. Those who knew how bad the Symbian was knew what was the real name of Anna and Belle. Those who didn’t had no idea about what in the world was somethong called Belle and then it was easy to make the transition to the widely known Android while forgetting the Symbian.
Cut the crap. It has everything to do with Elop and his decision to kill Symbian AND MeeGo, and go with WP only. Symbian was Nokia’s cash cow for god’s sake. Nokia hasn’t been stupid enough to kill its cash cow before Elop. Now wit Elop it is.
Only a stupid person kills their business on a promise of a future business, this is not rocket science. Elop and BOD are stupid.
No, it *isn’t* all Elops fault, you really don’t have a clue on Symbian/Nokias history, do you?
Nokia have badly mis-managed Symbian (and most of their products) for years – since the very early days, with in-fighting for the interface elements (S80, UIQ, S60, etc.)
Spending time on parallel developments of S^1 for the various product lines (different teams handling the 5230, 5800, N97, etc.), and all of them having totally different sets of bugs.
Teams fighting amongst themselves for resources. Management firmly with no clue how to move forward.
For example – they had the Download! feature in years back, basically it was an app store, but so badly configured it was a waste of time. If they’d spent more than 5 minutes thinking about it, they could have been in there way before Apple.
Maemo was going along fine until some bigwigs at Nokia thought they could do something with it, and brought Intel into the discussion and development slowed to a crawl – prior to that it was moving along quite nicely.
Elop is just the icing on the cake – he couldn’t have handled the Symbian->WP migration any worse, but to say that everything that was going wrong *before* that is his fault is plain stupid.
Wrong, MeeGo tie-up did very little to slow dev…
WTF do people continue to perpetuate this myth???
The slow down happened within Harmattan itself…
(& lead-up work/programs, & just getting started/focused-away from Symbian way too late)
They weren’t even close to shifting most resources to MeeGo proper before the strat. change was announced.
Here’s to all the thousands of Symbian engineers who were once at Nokia and are now at Accenture:
Why couldn’t you all make Qt/QML versions of the system apps? It took you lot two years to get Qt even working properly on Symbian and now you’ve run out of time to do the apps. Symbian is a perpetual dead-end work in progress. All the other promised stuff like dual-core processors and higher resolution displays are just fantasies now.
What a damned fine joke.
Now I’m glad that Nokia finally killed off Series 60 and Symbian. They made a godawful mess of the whole operating system and they were lucky to sell as many Symbian^3 devices as they did.
Dual core processors can’t be done wit the Qt. It would have been a huge task to code MP support to Symbian and that’s one of the reasons Nokia had when they decided to drop Symbian.
There is so much in Symbian system development you can’t do with Qt. The Qt is something you can use for applications and usually not for the actual underlying OS.
Okay with this you totally lost all respect of an insightful contributor. Haha
Qt can run on top of whatever structure providing multithreading and more cores. Totally irrelevant. The relevant part was to make the apps multithread and update the kernel. The most important work was done and could be looked into back when the Symbian.org site still hosted the sources!
It’s not about the Qt parts. In the Symbian OS there are large chunks of code that are not done using the Qt and you just can’t get those go MP with adding the Qt on top of the OS.
Sure, you can get Qt apps to do MP but it’s no use if the underlying OS can’t handle it and provide Qt the support it needs.
You do know that Qt on the Symbian uses calls to Symbian OS to make things happen? Qt isn’t something that is completely disconnected from the underlying Symbian OS.
Maybe it’s a language thing but I see your point.
Qt is a cross-platform framework that goes on top of OSes like Linux, OS X, Windows, Symbian, Meego. Qt is perfectly capable of multi-core support, multithreading and high resolutions, but only if the underlying OS and system libraries support it.
Symbian supports all these. Series 60 most likely does not or Nokia had a helluva time trying to do it. There are still lots of Symbian features which can’t be accessed using QML or Qt… you have to dig deep and hit the nasty old Symbian C++ to get them working. I think it was those Symbian and S60-specific bits that really slowed down Qt development on Symbian.
But what about the ARMv6 architecture limitation? S^3 only runs on ARM11/ARMv6 whereas S60v5, at least Samsung’s version on the Omnia HD, could run on Cortex A8/ARMv7.
Samsung did the porting themselves. At that stage the Symbian code base was not yet open source, so they did not have to contribute anything back to Nokia.
And how in the world did Samsung manage this, as a mere Symbian licensee at the same time they were dabbling in other OSes, while Nokia with its thousands of Symbian engineers could not? Porting ARMv6 to ARMv7 definitely wasn’t a trivial task but Samsung somehow did this with their flagship device, the Omnia HD. 3 years later, Nokia are still using ARM11/ARMv6 on the 808.
It’s just unbelievable how Nokia managed to screw up Symbian so completely, and in doing so, destroy its position as the market leader.
” It would have been a huge task to code MP support to Symbian and that’s one of the reasons Nokia had when they decided to drop Symbian.”
Totally untrue.. Symbian was the first mobile OS to get multi-core support way back in 2009 before Android & iOS dreamt about it.. Here is one of the link: http://www.intomobile.com/2009/06/13/symbian-running-on-a-multi-core-cpu-configuration/
And support for multi-core for Symbian was talked about in 2007. Check this link(remove the spaces): news.softpedia .com/ news/ Symbian-to-Support-ARM-039-s-New-Multicore-Processors-67743.shtml
I remember talks for Symbian’s multi core back in the 2002 but that was just talks.
You can get an OS to run, but making it stable is a different matter.
Now you just may remember that Nokia was going to add support for multiple cores in Carla/Donna? If you are so sure that Symbian had that support for years, then can you please explain why Nokia was going to add the same feature to the Symbian for the second time?
That 2009 announcement is typical Nokia. They announce some tech demo as a feature and just can’t deliver for years. And after all that time they re-announce the same feature as it were something new. Actually it is something new since the first iteration just wasn’t something you could deliver.
So I it would have been a huge task adding Symbian/Belle/WhateverFP a working and a stable support for multiple cores.
First of all, Symbian is not just Nokia’s S60-based OS. It had UIQ, MOAP & other different flavours. Until end-2010, Nokia didn’t control Symbian completely. Symbian Ltd governed the OS until 2009 after that Symbian Foundation took over until end-2010 when Nokia took it in-house.
The multi-core support is there in Symbian code-base and had a stable version working on ST-Electronics U8500. Everyone who had looked into the Symbian code when it was open-source under Symbian Foundation know about it. The 2009 announcement is from Symbian Foundation & ST-Electronics and not Nokia. And the 2007 announcement was from Symbian Ltd(an independent company in that time)..
Nokia not supporting dual-core until now is more of a management decision and they had earmarked it end-2012\early-2013 in the original Qt road map. They may have wanted Qt to be integrated first into Symbian before adding the multi-core & higher resolution support.
So you are seriously claiming that Nokia was going to add the support for multiple cores for a second time? Just for the laughs? Adding.
Now why was Nokia adding that to the Symbian OS instead of releasing some hardware supporting the feature their OS already had? Management decision is a cheesy explanation for adding support for the second time.
Sure, you can make different flavors of the OS by adding and ripping off some code. That won’t still make Nokia’s current Symbian Belle to support that feature. Nokia’s current Symbian codebase includes lot’s of code that just can’t make it to the MP. That device you gave just didn’t have that huge amount of Nokia specific code running on it.
So yes, you can make some parts of the OS to run so you can tell that specific old version was able to do it, but you just can’t do the same for all the code Belle has.
Sorry.
The core OS has the support for multi-core in it. There is no need to add it. Activating that doesn’t mean the complete OS can run on multi-core. It requires lot of optimizations & testing which Nokia postponed as a non-critical issue.
Yeah, you know what. I’ll rephrase my original statement.
It would have been a huge task for Nokia to code the MP support for the current full production version of the Symbian Belle. We can’t be sure but it’s possible Nokia even had too few developers for the work to be done in time. It’s just not about optimizations. It’s a huge task and requires lots of coding.
Symbian’s code base is a mess and yes, that’s subjective.
Symbian’s code-base (in Symbian Anna\Belle guise) isn’t messy. Symbian was messy before but Anna has changed lot of it. Supporting Multi-core isn’t just coding, there are other things to take care of. If it was, why did it take Google 2 iterations to fully support multi-core (Even though Gingerbread & Honeycomb “had” support for multi-core, Android is able to utilize its full potential in ICS). Also, why doesn’t WP have dual-core support even though the Windows CE on which it is based does?
The MP support was not designed to be released in Q3 of 2011, so what’s your point? 2012 was the target, but it remains to be seen if it ever sees the light of the day.
Only one word. KDE. Before you speak about what can and what cannot be done with Qt, try KDE.
Most of the Symbian developers at Accenture have already left.. Symbian is following N9′s path..
My dreams of owning a dual core belle phone with hd screen just went down the toilet.. Haha, oh well.
I hope Meltemi is able to give us what we prefer.
I don’t see anything new here? In fact, i thought those two clock widgets were designed by somebody who like to make widget skins on a Symbian forum?
If that’s not the case, and this is supposed to be refreshed Belle then something has gone wrong. I’m not expectingmuch any way, but that to me looks old and decrepit, certainly not refreshed.
It’s a pre release of te belle refresh updates so there may still be some changes added. I want that pull down notifications baf to be the same with belle fp1 please. Hooray for the new browser though
There’s nothing in those screenshots indicating its FP1 other than the new widgets that I already on my hacked Belle.. So, no.. I dun believe its the FP1 for the N8.
Those screenshots above are just one set. Check the others at unleashthephones.com, you could see the same redesigned Music player interface as the ones that were supposedly leaked for the Carla update.
So I’m guessing belle fp2 will get that as well? Belle refresh will get the 8.3 browser version, Fp2 will give that right?
Looks like a complete and utter mess. N9 really spoiled widgets forever to me.
“Looks like a complete and utter mess.
N9 really spoiled widgets forever to me.”
What on earth do you mean?
Probably that the N9 is very clean cut, streamlined, tidy whilst these widgets make it look messy for Peter.
Widget appearance doesn’t match to each other. Some of the widgets are really ugly to boot, that green clock widget is just plain awful.
After extensive time using only N9, I find widgets pretty much completely redundant.
Thanks for clarifying, it wasn’t clear, I do agree somewhat…
Having said that there’s options for widget-like functionality in Harmattan now, if one wants it.
what about dolby headphone on nokia belle refresh please please please clarify…
The idea of meltemi is scrapped too. The S40 OS on the latest Asha 311, 305 and 306 looks quite good.
Belle Refresh is nothing great. Symbian development will stop within the next 2 years instead of 2016. If WP8 screws up then Nokia is doomed for life.
cool story bro, thanks for the necro, not.
Hi,
if any one has tried with belle refresh, can you please tell me is the flash support for Nokia Belle in Nokia N8 is fixed .
We are not able to play flash videos like FLV and many others….
it just show F sign…
is it fixed in Belle Refresh??? any one able to Play FLV videos ????
(note : in Nokia Belle FP1 : this flash video playing issue was fixed…. donno about belle refresh)
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