May 10, 2011 12:19 GMT  ·  By

Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia is already hard at work with the development of the next flavor of Symbian, even if it announced plans to adopt Microsoft's Windows Phone operating system. The future OS update, supposedly called Symbian 'Belle', and expected to arrive on existing devices as the PR 3.0 update, has just made an appearance on the Internet, through Nokia Germany's website.

The latest Nokia smartphones are showed there with a brand new user interface on them, with icons that were not seen before, and which reportedly hint at the next Symbian release.

As one can clearly see in the shots attached to this article, the handsets sport free-form widgets, something that was supposed to be included in the latest Symbian release, Anna, but wasn't.

Clearly, Nokia thought that it would be a good idea to still include them in the platform, and the next release of the OS, Symbian Belle, would sport them.

Symbian^3 widgets have a fixed size, and users are offered the possibility to fit only a preset number of widgets to the phone's homescreen, something that would change in Belle.

As soon as the new feature will be introduced, users would be able to reduce the size of widgets they do not need frequently, to leave more room for the more important ones.

Since nothing was officially announced on the upcoming Symbian release, there are great chances that this would be only a Photoshop error coming from Nokia Germany's PR department.

However, since the same new UI was spotted on the company's YouTube channel only a few days ago, we might consider the images as being legit, though we'll take the info with a grain of salt until a formal announcement on this emerges.

Previously, the the next iteration of Symbian^3, which was supposed to arrive as Symbian^4 and which would be codenamed Bell, emerged on a banner at the top of Nokia Germany's YouTube channel (the banner was changed in the meantime).

Have a look at the screenshots attached to this article to make an idea on how the next Symbian release might look like. You can see Symbian Belle on Nokia Germany's website here, though the images would certainly be pulled shortly (via).

Photo Gallery (5 Images)

Symbian PR 3.0 Belle
Symbian PR 3.0 BelleSymbian PR 3.0 Belle
+2more