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Nokia's Mobility Conference is an annual event for Nokia's customers, developers, and press, to get an annual update on where the company is and where it's headed. It's kind of like an annual shareholder's meeting, but focused on products instead of all that financial mumbo jumbo.

It's typical for Nokia to announce new phones at NMC, and this year was no different. This year saw a major expansion of the new Nseries lineup of flagship phones. The lineup doubled, in fact, with three all-new phones.

Although Nokia tried to play up each phone as having a unique strength, in fact, each phone builds on the features of the next, going up the numbering scheme. So the new N80 has all the features of the new N71, and the N92, in turn, has nearly all of the features of the N80.

In addition to announcing three new phones, Nokia also provided a clearer picture of the current Nseries and S60 platform, even revealing new features of previously-announced phones that were not widely publicized before.

All of the new phones use the brand-new Third Edition of the S60 (formerly Series 60) smartphone platform. S60 Third Edition is based on Symbian OS version 9. Previous versions of Series 60 were based on Symbian 8, which is not binary-compatible. That means software applications written for previous versions of Series 60 probably won't work on phones with the new S60 Third Edition.

S60 Third Edition brings a wealth of new features to the platform. Most are behind-the-scenes, but the most obvious is support for a variety of new screen sizes and orientations. This brings it in line with the latest versions of Windows Mobile, although S60 adds the ability for soft-keys to be located down the side of the display instead of just along the bottom. This provides more flexibility in phone design, as seen in the recently-announced E70.

To support the large variety of screen sizes and shapes, new software written for S60 Third Edition uses scalable vector graphics (SVG), which lets developers create one flexible screen layout instead of separate layouts for each supported screen size and shape. This is another reason old Series 60 software won't work with new S60 Third Edition devices.

In addition to the three phones announced this week, several previously-announced phones will also be launched in Q1 2006 with S60 Third Edition. These include the N91, 3250, E60, E61, and E70.

Editor in Chief Rich became fascinated with cell phones in 1999, creating mobile web sites for phones with tiny black-and-white displays and obsessing over new phone models. Realizing a need for better info about phones, he started Phone Scoop in 2001, and has been helming the site ever since. Rich has spent two decades researching and covering every detail of the phone industry, traveling the world to tour factories, interview CEOs, and get every last spec and photo Phone Scoop readers have come to expect. As an industry veteran, Rich is a respected voice on phone technology of the past, present, and future.

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