Nokia to announce Symbian update in a week; releases Nokia Drop beta app now

It seems all those Symbian updates that Nokia has been working on since October last year are finally coming to fruition, with a major “Discover what’s new with Symbian Smartphones’ announcement scheduled for April 12th in London.
Check out the press invite above. The update is expected to pretty much refine the interface of the platform, hopefully extending beyond just the homescreen, browser, onscreen keyboards, and messaging, if previous announcements are anything to go by.

In related news, Nokia Beta Labs has released an experimental sharing application called Drop, which will allow users to send images and links from a browser to their Symbian smartphone. The push-application is available for Symbian^3 and Series 60 5th Edition smartphones. It requires a browser extension, compatible only with Firefox 3.6 or 4, and Chrome 10. The drop icon will have to be added to the browser’s toolbar for easy access.

Download the Nokia Drop beta app and extensions from here, and get to know more about it,here.

Windows 8 screenshots show Metro-style login screen, Ribbon-style interface

A whole set of Windows 8 screenshots have leaked, with Windows 8 Secrets co-authors Rafael Rivera and Paul Thurrott responsible for most of them, using pre-beta and alpha builds of the operating system.

Apart from incorporating WP7-inspired Metro UI for the login screen (as seen above), with a cute rendition of CTRL+ALT+DEL, it looks like Microsoft is also working to integrate a Ribbon-style interface for Windows Explorer with dynamic tabs, as well as more evolved preview panes and file/context-menu systems.

While the Ribbon interface can be hidden, it is possible that Microsoft intends the Ribbon interface for just one type UI i.e., Aero Lite, and that other view styles could ideally be used with other UI types.

Check out a whole bunch of screenshots below, and note, that these are from a pre-alpha build, and more often than not just give a general indication of what is to come, and in most cases, contain dummy icons: