Symbian Anna is the name for Symbian^3 PR2 (and PR means product release).
Symbian Belle is the name of the next update, and is a considerably larger update than Anna, with lots of UI changes.
Both use the same Symbian operating system, although Belle will have more updates. Most applications should be able to run on Symbian^3, Symbian Anna and Symbian Belle phones.
Symbian Anna can be updated on existing Symbian^3 phones such as the Nokia N8 and C7.
Symbian Belle can also be updated on Symbian^3 and Symbian Anna phones.
Nokia has made a specific point of making both of the updates fully compatible with older handsets on the same basic platform, so Symbian^3 handsets such as the Nokia N8 and Nokia E7 have been issued with a Symbian Anna update, and will also benefit from an update to Symbian Belle too.
That will leave a single group of high-end Symbian handsets all running on the latest Symbian Belle platform within the next few months.
So what about the updates themselves? A common question we're seeing right now is which is the bigger update – Symbian Anna or Symbian Belle? Well, we say this having not had a chance to actually try out Symbian Belle yet, but it seems obvious even at this stage that it's a far more bigger step forward than Symbian Anna is, which is great news indeed.
In terms of headline improvements, Symbian Anna offers an attractive new icon design and font, a better web browser plus updates to other Nokia services, a portrait-style QWERTY keyboard and split-screen text entry.
Symbian Belle offers a doubling of the number of homescreens you can work with, the introduction of more flexible homescreen widgets in several different sizes, a wide range of NFC capabilities (though that will of course rely on your phone itself being NFC-enabled, which of the current range only the Nokia C7 is), a new status bar which takes a neat drop-down approach to notifications, dynamic real-time multitasking previews and a lock screen that shows additional detail, such as incoming messages and missed calls.
We'll have plenty of time to delve into the specifics of each of these improvements in due course, but as a whole they certainly give us a lot to look forward to.
There's no sign yet of any device-specific features being rolled out with the Symbian Belle update, as we've seen for the Nokia C7 and Nokia N8 with Symbian Anna. Time will tell, but we're certainly not complaining about what we've seen so far.
