If you?re the owner of a Nokia E72, Nokia 5230 or other Nokia phone powered by a Symbian version prior to Symbian^3, you'll be as pleased to hear that some new features will be coming to your phone soon. In an apparent push to keep customers from defecting to other platforms until its Windows Phones ship and despite the arrival of the new Symbian platform and new phones such as the Nokia X7 and E6, the older Nokia devices that people are carrying in their pockets for years will be offered updates to their phones too, in order to improve their feature set, as well as to provide the usual fixes and improvements.

These updates will be targeted at selected phones running Symbian 3.2 and Symbian 5.0, Nokia said:

Symbian 3.2

Nokia E72
Nokia E52
Nokia E5
Nokia C5-00
Nokia 6700 slide

Symbian 5.0

Nokia C6-00
Nokia C5-03
Nokia 5230
Nokia 5235
Nokia 5250
Nokia X6
Nokia N97 mini
Nokia 5800 XpressMusic

Nokia 5530 XpressMusic One of the key updates is the Nokia browser v7.3, the same that will be available for newer Symbian phone in the coming months with Symbian Anna. It provides faster browsing, supports International Domain Names (IDNs) and also supports non-ASCII letters such as Arabic or Chinese.

Ovi Maps is another updated feature in these handsets, but there are two different versions to take into consideration. Ovi Maps 3 SR4 will feature on Symbian 3.2 devices, bringing indoor positioning through WiFi, as well as travel and recommendation services such as those through Lonely Planet. Users of Symbian 5.0 devices will get Ovi Maps 3 SR6, adding public transport lines and check-in services to social networking sites.

And finally, a set of emoticons will be added into all listed devices.

The launch of those updates goes like this: Nokia C6-00 and Nokia 5230 download release starts as of today, and the rest of the models will follow in the next few weeks.

Nokia added that the updates would not hit all the phones at the same time but would be rolled out in stages.