Earlier this week, Nokia made a rather flip and low key reveal on its official blog site, stating that it would be changing the name of its long running in-house operating system, Symbian Belle, to Nokia Belle. The move generated a lot of comments from customers asking why Nokia would make such a name change.
In a new blog post, Nokia tried to offer an explanation. As you can see, even they seem a little confused on the matter:
We are still using Symbian Belle with some audiences like developers but now we also have the flexibility of using Nokia Belle when referring to our greatest and latest Symbian software update. We are really looking forward to making Belle available to people as it will truly bring a new experience to everybody.
So ... that doesn"t really clear things up at all. Having a product with two brand names for different "audiences" sounds like it would be confusing. In any case, that"s their explanation.
The blog post also stated that the delay in releasing Symbian/Nokia Belle to February 2012 was because it will "make such a big difference in the user experience, and it is a major software update"; Owners of the Nokia 500 smartphone will also be receiving the update.