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Earlier this month, we were rather unimpressed with Nokia's rebranding of the N8 Symbian smartphone, and it seems someone took note. Because the promo video for the N8 Pink is anything  but unimaginative. In fact, it's downright frightening. The video features a series of contorted Barbies dolls, prancing about in Lady Gaga-esque undergarments, with accompaniment by British girl group Sugababes. This is one marketing campaign we won't soon forget. For a glimpse at the disturbingly enthralling cotton-candy romp, check out the video. Nokia

If you can accept what we're about to tell you as rumor, and nothing more, then we'd like to let you in on the latest scuttlebutt surrounding Nokia's first dip into the shallow Windows Phone waters. Eldar Murtazin, the eternal Nokia antagonist, claims to have the inside scoop on Nokia's current Windows Phone device plans while getting an early hands-on with a prototype. Besides demonstrating a natural extension of the Nokia naming strategy to accommodate the new Windows Phone devices, Eldar tells us that model W7 is built around an X7 hardware base while the new W8 handset is a variant of Nokia's N8 cameraphone (conceptualized in the above pic). According to Eldar, all of Nokia's WP prototypes are built upon Qualcomm chipsets per Microsoft's requirement (and Nokia's dismay). The W7 model is currently being used in-house for development purposes and will likely be the first to market, according to Eldar, with an 8 megapixel autofocus cam...

And now it's completely official: the new and freshened up version of Symbian we saw leak out over the weekend is indeed coming to Nokia's latest batch of handsets. The N8, E7, C7 and C6-01, the phones that ran what was formerly known as Symbian^3, will all be getting it "over the coming months," while the newly announced X7 and E6 devices will ship with it preloaded. The change list includes  real homescreen scrolling, an overhauled browser, and yes, even a QWERTY onscreen keyboard in portrait orientation. There's also new iconography and heavily refreshed Ovi Maps, which now include predictive search. Nokia is resolute in its belief that Ovi Maps is the best mapping solution on the market, and Microsoft's decision to integrate it into Bing would suggest that's true. The "Anna" Symbian update will be the first of a series and has been driven almost entirely by consumer feedback. Nokia also shared some Ovi Store stats with us. There are now fi...

This isn't our first encounter with the Nokia T7-00, but this time around we're getting a whole bunch more info thanks to some detailed pics leaked by PCPop . In a nutshell, the T7-00 appears to be a downgraded version of Nokia's N8 imaging flagship for the Chinese market. The phone is identical to the N8 in appearance, except for the missing camera pod in the back. Gone is the phenomenal 12 megapixel autofocus Zeiss shooter with xenon flash -- instead, you'll find an 8 megapixel camera (likely EDoF, like its E7 and C7 cousins) with dual-LED flash mounted flush with the body. In addition, the micro-USB connector finds a new home behind the plastic door that normally conceals the mini-HDMI port on the N8. Under the hood, the existing pentaband 3G radio gives way to China's proprietary TD-SCDMA standard, and the ARM 11 processor gets a 20MHz speed bump to 700MHz. Considering the vast numbers of mobile subscribers in China, the T7-00 is sure to help Nokia re...