Nokia announces first 1 GHz smartphone, changes naming convention again

We all know Nokia is working on hardware running Windows Phone for their high end smartphone line, but they still continue to roll out Symbian devices. With this latest announcement of the Nokia 500 they are changing their naming convention yet again. The Nokia 500 is also their first 1 GHz processor device, but I understand there is no GPU and according to All About Symbian it may have worse performance than the existing lineup of Symbian^3 devices.

The Nokia 500 will launch later this year at a low cost, EUR150 (about $215 USD), so it is understandable that the performance and specifications would be lower as well. It does appear to have decent specifications, but given that few in the US care about the Symbian OS it won't have much of an impact here. It will likely sell well in developing countries where Nokia and Symbian still do fairly well, but this won't help Nokia with any kind of market share or realized profits.

Specifications for the Nokia 500 include:

• 1 GHz ARM 11 processor
• Penta-band 3G data (Why can't ANYONE else get this right?)
• 2GB memory with microSD card slot
• 3.2 inch 640x360 pixesl display
• 5 megapixel EDoF camera with no flash
• WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS

Nokia has gone through a few naming conventions in the past and I thought their last one with Nseries, Eseries, Cseries, etc. seemed to make sense except when they started having multiple device names for some odd reason, such as the Nokia C6 that came in either -00 or -01 models. Anyway, their new naming convention, described in this Nokia Conversations post, goes back to 100,200,300,....900 series where they can use up to 99 numbers in each series to name phones. The Nokia 500 is the first in this new naming scheme and it is a mid-level smartphone. They already announced the Nokia N9 so they probably won't renumber it the 900, especially given that they are killing off MeeGo right after it launches anyway.

I don't think this new naming convention will do anything for the customer and will still present confusion. How are you supposed to know what device runs Symbian or S40? Will Windows Phone devices follow this convention too and if so then how will one tell if it is a WP or Symbian device? Seems to me sticking with the Series was just fine and maybe they should work on getting the Anna update out to those with 1-year old Nokia N8 devices instead of messing around with naming conventions.