Symbian^3 devices are now shipping with Belle out of the box

UPDATE: Starting today, Nokia smartphone users will now be able to download the Belle update for their Nokia N8, Nokia E7, Nokia E6, Nokia X7, Nokia C6-01, Nokia C7, or Nokia Oro device. It's available in the Indian subcontinent from today onwards as well. For Nokia 500, Nokia Belle will be made available within the next few weeks. 

As Nokia Belle is a major update, you’ll need to connect your phone to a PC to perform the update. To start, make sure you have the latest version of Nokia Suite (3.3 or later) running on your computer, and then connect your phone to the computer with a USB cable to update it. 

Remember, Symbian Belle? Yes, the same one we saw on the Nokia 701, which we reviewed, last year. Back then, we quite liked the functionality of that operating system and in our opinion, only app support was actually holding it back from being on par with the other operating systems. Now, as reported by Nokiapoweruser, Belle will now be supported default on all the new Symbian^3 devices that are being shipped. Nokia has officially stated on its Twitter account that a lot of devices, including the N8, C7, E7, E6, X7, C6-01 and 500 will now ship with Symbian Belle on board. However, we believe it also depends upon the date of the stock that the local store will have because Nokia has clearly mentioned to check with the local shop to see if the device is running Belle or not. 

Ring a Belle?

All N8 devices shipping to India will come with Belle on board, as tweeted by them. This also means that the other devices like the X7 and the C7 now come with a major software upgrade on board. If you’re not too sure about any device, you could just send a tweet to the official Nokia Twitter account and have your doubts cleared, because as you can see, their Twitter account is quite adept at answering and solving queries. 

Nokia tweets!

In our reviews, we did find Symbian Belle to be quite functional, slick and fast. It has the capacity to hold its own and not get overpowered by the other ‘more powerful’ operating systems in the market. The only thing that was quite similar to Android was the drop down notification bar. If you’re tired of all the Android phones and want a new experience on a ‘budget’ phone, we’d recommend you try out one of the cheaper Belle devices. They might not have the same flavour as Android, but they do have some good functionality packed inside. 

What do you guys think about Symbian Belle? Something that Nokia should simply scrap, or actively support along with keeping Windows Phone 7 first priority? Let us know in the comments section below.