Nokia is set to announce a brand new phone this coming March 11th, over on their events web site at events.nokia.com. The headline for the event reads, “Your music player is ringing,” so the new phone will probably be one for the Nokia XpressMusic range of music phones. And if I had to venture a guess, I’d say Nokia will probably announce the Nokia 5730 XpressMusic, a previously leaked music phone with a full slide-out QWERTY keyboard. Other than that, there’s no way of knowing what Nokia has in store for us. Yet another new service? Some low-end candybars? We’ll see on March 11th.

From Nokia’s live web cast, the Nokia E55 was officially revealed. It comes in a form factor similar to the Nokia E50, but it has a BlackBerry Suretype-like keypad (two characters on one number). Nokia says this is the world’s slimmest smartphone ever, and achieves up to a month of battery life. It will be available this summer for 265 Euros or about $340 USD. More info as it comes. See another photo of the Nokia E55 after the break.

Nokia E73 and E85
The gentleman from Russia has done it again. Eldar Murtazin of Mobile-Review has just dropped word, through his Nokia E75 review, that Nokia has been working on at least three devices that have a side-sliding QWERTY keyboards. These are the Nokia 5730 XpressMusic, Nokia E73, and Nokia E85. The Nokia 5730 XpressMusic, I suspect, will be announced on Nokia’s upcoming online music event. And I believe the Nokia E73 is the same QWERTY keyboard-equipped candybar that we saw last year as the Nokia E72 in a leaked Nokia promo vid. However, the last one, the Nokia E85, is a phone that I’ve never heard of until now.

According to Eldar, the Nokia E85, like the E73 and 5730 XpressMusic, will have a side-sliding QWERTY keyboard. His exact words:

Other than that, Eldar revealed nothing else about this mysterious new handset. Perhaps if we take another look at Nokia’s leaked smartphone roadmap which enumerates some upcoming devices, we’ll have a better idea of what the Nokia E85 is (or what it could be).

Could it be the Nokia Madeleine, which is described in Nokia’s leaked smartphone roadmap as having a Side-sliding QWERTY keyboard, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, FM Radio, VoIP, GPS, 3.2MP camera,…

O2 will be losing the exclusivity on the iPhone in the UK to Orange and T-Mobile as early as September 2009 although it looks like only the older version of the iPhone will be initially freed.

Both Orange and T-Mobile have been selling the iPhone 3G in a numbers of territories worldwide and Mobile Today understands that Apple is keen to boost sales significantly. Orange should be the logical choice since it is significantly larger than the Deutsch-Telekom owned mobile network.

Sources close to O2 say that the senior management at the network are apparently furious at the news and concerned that whoever picks up the iPhone 3G will end up forcing O2 to slash the contract price of the old iPhone 3G.

This of course could prove catastrophic as punters decide to stick to the older iPhone 3G and ignore the newer and faster iPhone 3GS. This is especially true if (a) the recession goes on for another year (b) if the gap between the two is significant.

The cheapest iPhone 3G contract will cost you ￡34.26 per month on a two year contract. It is likely that the competition shaves another ￡5 from the cost and brings it to less than ￡30.

The…

Nokia vehemently denied that it is working on an Android smartphone shortly after the Guardian reported that the Finnish manufacturer was mulling plans to launch a touchscreen Android device in September 2009.

A spokesperson for the company told Reuters that there was “absolutely no truth to this whatsoever” and that “Everyone knows that Symbian is our preferred platform for advanced mobile devices”.

Nokia purchased Samsung’s Symbian share in September 2008 for $410 million and many argue that since Symbian powers more than 200 milliom mobile phones, it might be a tough cookie to dislodge. The other aspect is that Nokia has been investing heavily in OVI, its online application store which competes directly with Google Marketplace.

It is interesting to see that the spokesperson used the word “preferred” platform which means that there might be more than one contender. As part of Nokia’s partnership with Intel, the mobile phone giant will also be working on Maemo which will reach version 5.0 sometimes next year under the monikers Fremantle or Harmattan.