Symbian Anna's Browser and Email Under Scope

Symbian Anna is currently rolling out on mobile phones that landed on shelves with the Symbian^3 platform on board, bringing along a nice range of enhancements, some of which are related to the handset's browser, while others improved the emailing capabilities of devices.

The new OS flavor comes around with the new Nokia Browser (V7.3), which was redesigned with a new look, leaving aside the old menu bar and bringing into the mix two icons sitting in both corners at the bottom of the page.

The right icon will bring up all the options that you might be looking for in the browser, including Homepage; Bookmarks; Settings; Add RSS Feed; and other options as well, including info on the browser version number and page info, and the like.

On the bottom left corner of the screen, users will have the back arrow. “Press it, and a small history section will pop up showing your current open Internet page with the previous pages situated behind it and to the left,” a post on Nokia Conversations reads.

“Dragging your finger across the screen from left to right scrolls through the pages. Once you’ve found the page you want to navigate back to, make sure that page is in the centre of the screen and press select on the bottom of the screen.”

There is a new address bar included with the browser in Symbian Anna. Placed at the top, it offers easy navigation to any website. When tapping it, the keyboard will appear at the bottom of the screen. Users can also have the QWERTY keyboard displayed, it's all in the options menu.

In addition to the browser, the new Symbian Anna brings enhancements to the email client as well, aimed mainly at business users, such as full support for meeting requests and more.

“If you find yourself on the receiving end of an email with a meeting request, rather than a normal email page, you’ll see a screen with the meeting name, the time and date it’s taking place and even the location – which when clicked, opens up Nokia Maps to show you that location,” the blog post continues.

When creating an email in Symbian Anna, users will go through the usual way of adding email accounts to recipients. However, now there is a keyboard available in the split-screen mode, enabling users to easily add text while remaining on the same screen.

“Another thing you’ll notice here is that as you begin to type a name to send it to, the phone automatically finds relevant people in your phone book, if they match the letters typed. This makes sending emails that little bit quicker,” the blog post explains.

In addition to these enhancements, there is an improvement related to the virtual keyboard in Symbian Anna, which comes with an options key through which users can choose to have the portrait QWERTY displayed on the device, for faster composing of emails, messages or other text.

Symbian Anna was made available for download for Nokia N8, C6-01, C7 and E7 devices only a few weeks ago, and is currently rolling out through Nokia's usual channels in a variety of markets around the world.