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VNUNet: Nokia has released its Nokia E63 handset, which features similar functionality to the rest of the firm’s business-oriented Eseries line but adds capabilities aimed at the consumer.

“Our research shows that people want a device that deals with both their personal and professional lives, but helps them to separate the two,” said Nokia senior vice president Soren Petersen.

Nokia explained that the E63 fits the typical Eseries mould, offering Wi-Fi connectivity, easy access to corporate mail, calendar and business contacts, as well as the Qwerty keyboard that is offered with the Nokia E71. But the E63 will also offer a personal mode with a different homescreen picture, personal email and shortcuts to blogs and web sites.

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IntoMobile: In an effort to push further into emerging markets, Nokia has announced the 7100 Supernova, 5130 XpressMusic, 2323 and 2330 Classic, the 1202 and the 1661.

They’re all pretty basic candybars, but they’re primarily intended to support the two new services Nokia is rolling out.

Nokia Life Tools will offer rural users easy access to agricultural and academic information. This is an outstanding offer, since it can be hard getting a hold of those vital materials in remote locales. The other new initiative, Mail on Ovi, will allow users to create and use e-mail addresses from their handheld alone – no need for a computer.

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Electricpig: Two designs from Nokia’s future phone labs have surfaced. One’s an eight megapixel flat phone designed for treehuggers, the other’s a touchscreen phone with a tactile difference.

The Nokia Liquid phone uses, according to designer Rune Larsen, a liquid layer between the touchscreen and your fingers. The liquid is channelled into areas to give actual squishy buttons you can press down on, on the phone’s surface.

Meanwhile, Nokia’s eco-team have apparently decided the future is in a whittle-your-own-phone – a sustainable timber-bodied eight megapixel camphone with a speaker.

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Register Hardware: Nokia may be preparing the successor to its E90 Communicator, if a pair of images that the phone giant used in a recent presentation about its S60 user interface are taken at face value.

Images of the unnamed handset show a device that borrows much of its styling from the currently available E90 Communicator, which was launched way back in early 2007. The new device likewise opens up to reveal a Qwerty keyboard.

However, the keyboard appears to have been replaced with a flat, touch-sensitive unit. Continuing the theme of touch-sensitivity, the main display must be a touchscreen, given the lack of a numberpad.

  
It’s also worth noting that the Qwerty keyboard appears to swivel around for use alongside the main display, rather than open up, clamshell fashion, as the E90 does.

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InformationWeek: With the introduction of the 5800 XpressMusic, Nokia is finally launching a touch-screen competitor to Apple’s iPhone 3G. The 5800 has a 3.2-inch resistive touch screen and it’s powered by Symbian S60, 5th edition. The user interface will be somewhat familiar to Symbian users, but the company has tweaked the UI for touch control.

“By adding the benefits of touch-screen technology to S60, the world’s leading smartphone interface, Nokia is taking the familiar and giving it a human touch,” said Nokia VP Jo Harlow, in a statement.

With a 640 by 360 display, the 5800 can play multiple types of video at a high resolution. Nokia is also emphasizing the handset’s audio abilities, and there will be a built-in music player capable of multiple codecs. The handset will come with an 8-GB microSD card for storing this media, and the memory can be expanded up to 16 GB.

Nokia’s first touch-screen handset also has a bevy of connectivity options with built-in Wi-Fi and 3G capabilities. The 5800 will also have Bluetooth version 2.0, GPS, and a proximity sensor to save battery life and avoid inadvertent touches.

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Electronista: Nokia introduced a range of headphones. The BH-504 set doubles as a headset and features echo cancellation and noise reduction technology built in for clearer conversations. The headphones sport dedicated music controls including a volume adjustment. The folding headphones are battery-powered and rated at 7.5 hours of playback time and 9 hours of talk time.

The other headphones, although wired, are also capable of handling calls thanks to built-in microphones. The over-the-ear design of the WH-500, the WH-800 have an in-ear design and the WH-202s are the most compact, as they’re earbuds. The WH-500 is similar to the BH-504 set, also sporting music controls although they are located on the wire that ends in a 3.5mm audio jack.

The WH-202 headphones lack any type of music controls but plug right into cellphones thanks to their 2.5mm audio jack. The WH-800 earbuds have adjustable ear hooks and a volume adjustment.

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PC World: Motorola is hoping to stem its recent financial bloodletting by throwing its might behind the popular Android operating system. It’s betting that Android is the mobile OS of the future and has reportedly begun to assemble a 350 team of Android developers to transform its mobile business.

Motorola’s weak point has always been the software interface. While phones like the hugely popular RAZR V3 sold in millions across the world, users were never particularly impressed with the software capabilities of the devices. In a bid to turn its luck around, Motorola is now set to adopt Google’s Android mobile operating system, bridging the gaps between hardware and software.

Also Nokia is said to already have an Android team mingling around. Though Nokia is determined to keep Symbian going as long as possible, if Android really takes off, we might see substantial changes in the company’s strategy as well.

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VNUNet.com: Nokia is preparing to launch a new touch-screen smartphone device. According to sources cited by Reuters, the handset will be launched at a special event on 2 October in London.

Codenamed Tube, the handset will be the first touch-screen model from Nokia and will compete in the high-end market alongside the Apple iPhone and the latest models from Samsung and HTC.

Since it was first announced in early August, details on the Tube project have been few and far between.

In addition to the touch-screen capabilities, the Tube is said to feature a Wi-Fi connection and support for Java as well as DVB-H mobile TV broadcasts.

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Electricpig: Indoor Positioning, Nokia’s mind-bending system to guide you around inside buildings where traditional GPS is unavailable, is due to launch this year. It’s clever, has millions of uses, and is finally becoming reality!

First unveiled last year, Indoor Positioning uses wireless networks and clever mobile mapping to figure out a phone’s location within an enclosed space. Then it can guide the phone’s owner to a position, even if there’s no GPS signal available.

It’s designed to help users find their seats in sports stadiums, find parked cars, or even track down specific stores in malls and shopping centres. But it doesn’t stop there. Nokia’s already trialling it in 40 of its own buildings, and has begun to map public places too. A commercial trial will launch later this year at a shopping mall in Helsinki.

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Engadget: A recent Reuters article doesn’t mention a specific model (although we have our hunches), but one thing’s for sure: some kind of Comes with Music handset is launching on October 17th.

We had previously assumed that October 2nd would be the go-live date for the intriguing music bundle.

Retailer Carphone Warehouse has now made clear that Britain won’t be able to buy in until a few weeks later.

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Crave: To celebrate its 150th anniversary, House of Boucheron, the posh French creator of jewelry, watches, and fragrances, is sharing the swankness with a set of Vertu bejeweled cell phones bearing names such as Magic, Audacious, Curious, and Voluptuous.

The Dangerous model is a pink-gold phone with paved cabochon, white and yellow diamonds, rubies, and sapphires.

Maybe the fact that the cell phone charms are detachable and can also be worn as pendants or dangled as glittery hypnosis tools will help justify the cost. In other Vertu news, luxury-spotting blog Sybarite reports that the high-end British-based subsidiary of Nokia has finally unveiled its updated Signature phone six years after the release of the original.

The next-generation Signature will be a 3G phone available in white gold, yellow gold, and stainless steel. It will feature a SIM drawer that will let users remove the SIM card without the need for removing the battery cover and a keypad containing 4.75 carats of solid ruby bearings.

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Guardian: The smartphone market is a hard one to track because of devices sold under a wide variety of names, and because research firms have different definitions of smart phones. It’s also subject to change when new products take off (like the Apple iPhone) or fade. In other words, don’t bet your house on anybody’s “real” market share.

Still, according to Gartner, Nokia is still by far the market leader with 47.5% of the smartphone market on 15.2m units sold to users. RIM has done well with BlackBerry sales growing by 126.4% to 5.6m units, year over year, and it has now overtaken Windows Mobile.

Apple did not star in this quarter because it was in a product transition. Gartner comments: “in the second quarter of 2008, Apple’s share of global smartphone sales to end users decreased to 2.8% from 5.3% in the first quarter of 2008. The significant drop in sales was mainly due to the company having to clean the channel of first-generation iPhone units before the arrival of the iPhone 3G in June”.

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