Nokia talks up benefits of Symbian^3

Mobile firm betting big on latest OS version for the N8

Nokia believes that Symbian^3 will prove a worthy rival to iOS and Android

Nokia has outlined some of the features of its Symbian^3 operating system that will ship with the forthcoming N8 handset.

The update is the latest to Nokia's ageing Symbian platform, and is widely perceived as vital in turning round the manufacturer's fortunes.

Nokia aims to ship around 50 million Symbian^3 devices, although the company announced recently that future N-series devices will run the Meego operating system.

Symbian^3 has over 250 new features, Nokia said, including support for multi-touch, improved graphics, better multi-tasking and improved location services.

Developers are catered for with Qt, a standard development environment that Nokia says will aid in the deployment of applications.

Symbian^3 also supports video output via HDMI, and Nokia claims that updates to the networking code have resulted in "improvements to data flow performance" .

Updates to the graphics subsystem, meanwhile, will allow for hardware acceleration that should improve handset performance when running games.

The latest release will be seen as the first in which Nokia finally reaches some level of feature parity with Apple's iOS and Google's Android.

However, with the N8 still not in stores, the question is whether the improvements have arrived a little too late.