Nokia releasing Symbian V3, Maemo 6 in second half of year

Nokia has yet to catch up in the US smartphone market, though it could be argued that they don’t need to. Most of the complaints against the companies phones are that they aren’t subsidized by carriers, and lack capacitive screens and multitouch features. With Google introducing multitouch to the Nexus One, this is even more of a loss to Nokia, though one it could overcome by the end of the year.

Digitimes is reporting that Nokia will be skipping Version 2 of Symbian, and skipping straight to V3 by the third quarter of 2010. Symbian V3 will finally add multitouch controls to the mobile OS, which is could be argued are much needed. Nokia is also said to be releasing phones running Maemo 6 sometime in the second half of the year. It is rumored that after these, either in late 2010, or early 2011 we’ll see Symbian V4, which is thought to allow for cross-platform applications to be written for both Symbian and Maemo.

Adding multitouch to it’s phones could finally bring Nokia to the feature set that most Americans seem to want from their smartphones. Adding cross-platform apps to Symbian and Maemo would be a great help for future Maemo phones so they could access more apps. It’ll be exciting to see where Nokia brings these phones, and if they’ll be a bit more affordable to Americans. Either way, more Maemo phones would be interesting, especially if multitouch could be worked into them.

Read [DigiTimes] via [Boy Genius Report]