ReadWriteWeb

The death spiral of Nokia's smartphone brands continues. Symbian, which once was a global powerhouse for smartphone adoption, will no longer be sold in North America. This comes on the heels of the news that the MeeGo-based Nokia N9, considered to be its most powerful and user-friendly phone to date, will also not be available in the United States.

There was really no reason for Nokia to keep Symbian around in North America. It had never reached any type of critical market or mind share and devices were rare on the shelves of the four major U.S. carriers. Yet, there is something to be said for Nokia's dominating brand getting phased out. It never had a great user interface, although it had a healthy app store with Ovi, with thousands of developers worldwide making Symbian apps. Yet, with Nokia prepping for a large scale launch of Windows Phone 7, there is no room left in the North American market for Symbian or MeeGo.

Today, Nokia announced two new Symbian-based smartphone devices, the E6 and X7, both of which will launch with the latest version of the Symbian software, code-named "Symbian Anna." The update brings new icons, usability enhancements, a faster Web browser and a new version of Ovi Maps.

Despite Nokia's plans to move its smartphone product line over to Windows Phone, the company is still actively developing Symbian during the transition period of 2011 to 2012, and expects to sell 150 million more devices running the mobile operating system. Those will join the 200 million devices in the market now. With those numbers in mind, it's not surprising that Nokia's other news today involves the growth of its Ovi Store, which the company said has increased by nearly eight times over the last year, now reaching 5 million downloads per day.

Just prior to the start of this week's annual Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona, Microsoft and Nokia shook up the mobile industry with the announcement that Nokia would abandon work on its MeeGo smartphone operating system (OS) and would begin shipping handsets running Windows Phone 7 starting sometime this year.

Eventually, said Nokia, Symbian handsets will be phased out as Windows Phone becomes the company's new flagship OS. So what does this mean for the developer community?

Nokia is expected to announce a new partnership with Microsoft at its annual Capital Markets Day tomorrow, according to several reports. Nokia CEO Stephen Elop, an outsider who arrived from Microsoft last year to take charge of the Finnish company, believes that a partnership between Nokia and another yet-to-be named player is Nokia's best bet going forward.

As big as Nokia is, it can't afford to go it alone, Elop told the blog AllThingsD in an interview last week. But who is Nokia's new partner? BusinessWeek says that Elop held talks with both Microsoft and Google on the matter. But now, all signs are pointing to Microsoft as the key to Nokia's radical strategy shift.

This week, Nokia provided an update on its Ovi Store's momentum, in terms of downloads. The company said it's now seeing 3 million application downloads per day, up from 2 million back in September. Over the past 12 months, 400,000 new developers have joined its Forum Nokia developer network and its Qt Software Development Kit (SDK) has been downloaded 1.5 million times. What's more, 92 developers have even seen their apps downloaded over a million times.

All these statistics point to one thing, says Nokia: turnaround is happening.

Handset maker Nokia today announced the creation of an experimental app called "Nokia Situations" that can automatically adjust the phone's behavior for various situations and contexts. For example, the app could shut off the ringer whenever you go into a meeting, without you having to explicitly change settings on the device.

According to the application's description, Nokia Situations is able to "sense" things like the time of day, your location, what networks you're connected to, and then adjust one or more phone settings accordingly.

There are some 225,000 mobile applications for the iPhone now and 70,000 for Android, so every so often we like to highlight a few that have caught our attention. This latest edition of our favorite smartphone apps includes a few in testing, a few we're madly in love with, some notable updates and some you may not have even heard of yet.

Yesterday Good released its first ever quarterly report on enterprise mobile device activations. In August, we reported that the iPhone 4, released on June 24, was Good's top most activated device in by the end of July. Good's first quarterly report confirms what we reported in August - iOS remains the most activated device among Good customers. Good doesn't support BlackBerry, which according to Forrester is still the most popular enterprise smart phone OS. Here's Good's top ten:

Nokia just announced a new mobile application development contest that comes with $10 million in "cash, devices and marketing prizes" up for grabs. The "Calling All Innovators" contest, presented by Nokia and AT&T, is designed to encourage developers in North America to build applications for the company's mobile customers.

Although the handset manufacturer is still tops worldwide in terms of market share, it has struggled to attract developers to build apps for its Symbian mobile operating system platform, which features an iTunes App Store competitor called the Ovi Store.

At this week's Nokia World 2010 event in London, Purnima Kochikar, Nokia's developer chief, announced to the audience during her keynote speech that there is a real "hunger for Java applications" out there in the world, and people are willing to pay for them.

Although the Silicon Valley tech press is caught up with iPhone and Android because they're the focus of the Valley's developer ecosystem, that group is "about to get a lot more competition," Kochikar warned, because today Nokia is launching the first touchscreen SDK (software development kit) for feature phones - the phones that still have the largest install base on the planet.