After months of anticipation, Nokia has officially begun its roll out of the Symbian Anna update for the US NAM versions of the N8, C7, C6-01 and E7.

The update makes major and minor changes to the operating system such as a portrait virtual QWERTY keyboard and changes to the photo gallery as well as instant messaging with Microsoft Communicator Mobile, meeting requests and hardware-accelerated device encryption in the updated Email application. Symbian Anna also includes updated Nokia Maps, web browser, Nokia Store, Nokia Suite, and Nokia’s Social applications while activating the NFC hardware in the Nokia C7, which allows it to be used with mobile wallet applications. The update will be made available over the air and over the recently updated Nokia Suite.

Nokia has announced that it will roll out updates to select phones running Series 60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2 and Series 60 5th Edition which will include the Symbian Anna web browser, which adds support for non-ASCII characters, international domains, and will render web sites faster. The update will also update Ovi Maps, adding indoor positioning via Wi-Fi and Lonely Planet content for Symbian 3.2, and public transport and check-in support for Symbian 5 and all devices will have access to more emoticons. Devices lined up to receive the update include the E72, E52, E5, C5-00, 6700 slide as well as the C6-00, C5-03, 5230, 5235, 5250, X6, N97 mini, 5800 XpressMusic, and the 5530 XpressMusic.

Nokia has announced new features being added to the Symbian Anna update for the N8 coming in the next few weeks, with key features taken from hacks performed by the Symbian community. When the update for the N8 rolls out it will add continuous autofocus for video capture and full 720p30 video resolution for video capture, making the camera functionality in the N8 the best on the market.

With continuous autofocus for video recording, the subject of the image will not lose focus as the camera is pointed near and far while following the subject and the inclusion of 30fps video recording means that the video can be smoother and easier to capture when dealing with fast action. This has delayed the Anna update for the N8 as the C7 and other related models have been updated, with Nokia refusing to commit to a new date for the update.

After first being announced in November of last year as a last ditch effort to save Symbian following the failure of the Symbian Foundation to reach its stated goals, the European Commission’s SYMBEOSE initiative has been canceled without the intended 22 million euro loan changing hands.

The SYMBEOSE consortium was intended to turn Symbian into a pan European operating system with support from manufacturers in order to drive research and development for new devices. With Nokia’s shift away from Symbian towards Windows Phone this February, Nokia has once again shifted Symbian away from a community project to a per license model intended for manufacturers to contribute to the platform.

Nokia has confirmed that it will cut 4,000 jobs related to research and development as well as an additional 3,000 via outsourcing contract to outsourcing firm Accenture, moving the internal Symbian development team to the firm in an attempt to save US$1.46 billion in R&D costs by 2013. The new deal is a further expansion of its move away from Symbian as it begins its planned transition to Windows Phone 7 for its smartphone platform later this year.

While the move of the Symbian team to Accenture is considered by many to be confusing, the firm does specialize in such contract work. However, no mention was made of the SYMBEOSE deal signed by Nokia late last year with assistance provided by the European Union to turn Symbian into the pan European open source smart phone platform, which was subsequently abandoned. This, along with the closure of the Symbian Foundation led to Nokia closing Symbian source and relicensing Symbian under a non-free, non-GPL commercial license earlier this year.

Nokia’s last major Symbian device in the E7 has been officially posted for pre-order on Nokia’s own online store ahead of its official launch next month. The E7 features a tilting 4 inch wide sliding touch display which covers a QWERTY keyboard and also features an 8 megapixel camera with 720p video capture. Like the C6 and C7, the E7 also features Nokia’s new ClearBlack Display technology.

As an E series device, the phone features apps such as Mail for Exchange with Outlook sync of contacts, calendar, notes and multiple calendars with meeting request support, IBM Lotus Notes Traveler, Quickoffice Dynamic Premium, Adobe PDF reader and F-Secure Anti-theft software with a fixed 16GB of space due to the lack of space in the bodyshell leading to the omission of a microSD card slot. Pricing is set at $679.99 reflecting its newfound position in the lineup as a flagship Symbian device.

Nokia today announced their plan to transition the their smartphone division to Windows Phone 7, over the next two years.

The company has recently acknowledged the extreme difficulties that it has had in evolving to the new generation of smartphone platforms. By embracing Windows Phone 7, and entering into a strategic partnership with Microsoft, Nokia hopes to establish a new ability to compete in marketplaces such as the United States.

By embracing Windows Phone 7, Nokia has also announced the fates of Symbian and MeeGo. Symbian will become a “franchise” platform, and Nokia has stated that they hope to transition those customers to Windows Phone 7 by offering the Ovi suite of services to Nokia devices running WP7. Nokia did leave some wiggle room in this statement; Symbian may become the preferred feature phone platform, as many (including PhoneNews.com) have long expected. This will likely depend on if Microsoft re-tools Windows Phone 7 to also target feature phones and replace KIN.

MeeGo will become an experimental platform for Nokia, and Nokia reiterated that they still intend to ship a MeeGo device later this year. The Nokia N900 is powered by Maemo, the predecessor to MeeGo, though Nokia has offered consistent beta builds of MeeGo for testers on the device. MeeGo is jointly developed by Intel and Nokia.

Finally, Nokia has confirmed late in the day that they will comply with Microsoft’s rigid demands for Windows Phone 7 devices, though Nokia’s strategic partnership may allow them to offer up solutions that Microsoft would reject from other manufacturers. This means that Nokia’s cross-platform framework, Qt, will not be offered on Windows Phone 7. Nokia has said they will continue to support Qt, for the legacy Symbian and future MeeGo platforms. The Qt team has also confirmed that they will offer solutions and advice to developers to help them bridge Qt and WP7 frameworks; primarily Silverlight, Visual Studio, and Expression Blend.

Following up on the news of Nokia canceling the X7 for AT&T last week, it seems that T-Mobile has canceled the successor to its surprisingly popular Nuron in the Nuron 2, which would have been a rebranded Nokia C5-03.

The C5-03 as available in Europe features S60 5th Edition, a 3.2 inch resistive touch display with a resolution of 640 x 360, 5.0 megapixel camera with no flash and video recording at 15 frames per second, Wi-Fi, GPS, a digital compass, quadband GSM/EDGE support and triband 3G, 3.5 mm headphone jack, microUSB port and Bluetooth 2.0.

Training on the device was to have started tomorrow with the launch meant for February 4th before it was canceled within the last week. The cancelation of the Nuron 2 is a strange one as the first Nuron was considered one of the most popular Nokia Symbian smartphones in the US.

The cancelation of the X7 and the increasing irrelevance of Nokia and Symbian in the US market may have influenced the carrier’s decision to cancel the phone so close to launch as Nokia continues to struggle with decreasing market share in the US and other developed countries.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Nokia has canceled a planned launch of the Symbian^3 powered Nokia X7 originally intended for AT&T as an exclusive model due to a lack of confidence in AT&T’s ability to promote the device and their willingness to subsidize the device in order to draw customers to the smartphone.

Were the X7 to be launched as scheduled, it would have been introduced during next month’s Mobile World Congress with a late February launch.

Over the past few months, Nokia and Symbian Foundation have moved around assets to a degree that would make a startup blush. Yesterday, the two announced that Nokia would be taking over primary development control of the Symbian platform, but that Symbian Foundation would remain as a licensing authority.

This leaves more questions than answers. Will Symbian Foundation’s licensing role have any control over the platform’s directions? If Nokia wants to make the code difficult to use on other platforms, what is their steering power checked by at Symbian Foundation? And, where did all that EU funding go?

For example, let’s say I want to make a CDMA Symbian smartphone. Is Symbian Foundation going to help me make that happen, or am I going to have to beg Nokia to fix the bugs in the CDMA support that hasn’t been revived in eons?

I know that seems harsh, but these perpetual shakeups around the Symbian platform make decision makers question what in the world is going on with Symbian. I’m not even going to try and figure out the EU cash breakdown, but I suspect Symbian Foundation is keeping it, to pay a lot of people, to try and see if Symbian has a future outside Nokia. Personally, I doubt it, but for once my tax dollars aren’t being wasted on the bailout, so I really couldn’t care less.

This is the part where I ask if Symbian Foundation is the technical equivalent of digging holes to fill them. Which, for a government-backed bailout, is pretty par for the course…

What I do care about is the assertion that Symbian is a relevant smartphone platform. Do I believe it can be? Yes. Do I believe it is now? No, I do not.

Here’s why. Symbian is shipped on a lot of feature phones. These are phones that Nokia, developers, and carriers know very well will never be used as smartphones. These are phones with better cameras, better audio quality, and what retail salespeople push to consumers that don’t want/need an Android/MeeGo/iPhone platform.

There is a sliver of customers that do use smartphone-grade services like Ovi Maps, but don’t use App Stores, multitasking, etc. Most of those are, in my opinion, impulse buys. Those customers would buy a BREW MP phone if it was billed as “Navigation Edition” or one of the other branding that Nokia routinely uses.

Where’s the proof? Just compare App Store download rates. People aren’t downloading from Ovi, compared to iOS and Android. Only webOS and Windows Marketplace fall below Ovi Store. And, I don’t need to explain why those two have issues… those companies know what they need to do, respectively.

Sony Ericsson knows all of this all too well. They targeted the elite with UIQ. And failed round after round. Android saved the company, quite literally. Motorola? Same story, bigger win with Android so far too. The point is that the user base of Symbian users who take advantage of more than what BREW MP or other elite featurephone platforms tap into is small. Worse, Nokia wants to sell those customers MeeGo devices.

In the end, there are two customer bases for Symbian. Those that would otherwise use BREW MP, and those heading to MeeGo, with nada in-between. Nokia is still living in a dream world if there is this magical, hidden space in-between. There isn’t.

That said, Android is struggling to break into the featurephone world. I’ve seen a few, and quite frankly, Symbian blows them away. For Nokia to thrive in this marketplace though, Symbian has to stay open in development. No more forking of projects like WebKit and making it cumbersome to contribute back to the upstream projects. Ordinary consumers don’t care, but it affects the product and it affects developers.

Right now, Android is more open in development than Symbian. By a mile. Nokia could take the same standards in building Symbian that Google uses, and it would attract people to the platform.

Otherwise, nobody will want to partner with Nokia as a device manufacturer. Anyone that hasn’t already ran for the hills will join Motorola and Sony Ericsson. And, the EU will be asking why €22,000,000 went up in smoke. In the end, Nokia will be asking how they became the next General Motors.