Owners of older Nokia phones hoping to get Belle still in 2011 might be a bit disappointed: Nokia's N8, E7, X7, C6-01, C7, Oro, E6, and the Nokia 500 will receive the newest Symbian OS version (Belle) in "early 2012" only.

Symbian is still the most used OS in Europe. But its share is declining rapidly. Symbian Belle is an up to date system. But Symbian won't make it past 2016. For every good news on Nokia's once so popular OS, there is bad news coming to balance it. A recent study on OS distribution on the top 5 EU-countries is just a small cheer-up. Still, consumers and developers should not give up on Symbian too quickly.

Nokia has not only announced the launch of Belle, the latest Symbian update, as well as three new Symbian smart phones, but also pledged to keep investing in and enhancing Symbian. Although WP7 is planned to be Nokia's only OS in the future, it seems the company does not want to give up the successful Symbian market right away.

While Symbian phones are still quite popular in several parts of the world, including Central and Eastern Europe, Nokia always struggled to sell them in the US. Now Nokia Inc. President Chris Weber said in an interview that they will withdraw Symbian from the US - and that there is also no intention to bring MeeGo to the States, as WP7 will be the priority.

While still learning and advancing their development skills, students of an Austrian university have been quite successful in promoting their apps through the Ovi Store. So far they have reached over 2.5 million downloads with games like Fishfarm and other apps.

The Finnish manufacturer is replacing the Ovi brand completely, with all Ovi services now receiving the Nokia branding. The change affects all products under the Ovi name like maps or navigation. Roadmaps for those products are unaffected by the name change.

Nokia's Location APIs are embedded in a wide range of services and tools on Ovi Maps with comprehensive maps, routing, navigation and positioning functionalities, and tens of millions of places globally.

The Groups at Forum Nokia improve communication with other developers and enable members to start and lead new teams. Initiating worldwide discussions on interesting subjects is as easy as finding developers nearby to connect with, exchange opinions or share a few jokes.

Nokia now clarified the statement from last week announcing the Symbian source code to be back online. To set things straight it was now made clear the openness did not refer to the term open source.

The transfer of the source code is completed and it is available for access again. It has been offline and only obtainable by request after the website of the Symbian Foundation closed down.

Apps developed with the Qt SDK 1.1 Beta are now being accepted into the $10 million (USD) Calling All Innovators North America contest presented by AT&T and Nokia. The deadline for contest entries has been extended to 31 March.

Get inside the interview to know more about the next Nokia steps in terms of Windows, Symbian and Java. At Mobile World Congress we met Phillip Parfitt from "forum.nokia".

How does app marketing work on Nokia OviStore and how does the perfect app look like? Answers by Martin Giesswein, Nokia country manager for Austria.