Rafe Blandford has provided us with his very insightful and generally quite accurate predictions for the coming year. A good deal of his thoughts on what is likely to happen in 2008 focuses on S60 and Nokia of course. It’s quite an interesting read as he tells us to be on the lookout for S60 touch (though not likely until the end of the year) and plenty of Nseries releases with FP2 and quite possibly a resolution bump.  Ovi will no doubt become more defined and will begin to start marching forward to its full potential. He reminds us that Nokia Maps will continue to develop and that we’ll see more products associated with the mapping information systems. He expects that along with touch, Nokia will present us with several new form factors, at least to Nokia design- and more devices with full keyboards.

He touches more on N-Gage, Nokia Music and the new ‘Comes with Music’ deal as well as Eseries and more emphasis on developers tools to take advantage of FlashLite and WRT.

It’s a very good read and he also explores thoughts and predictions on other areas of S60 unrelated to Nokia as Samsung tries to give Nokia a run for the money this year and Motorola tries to keep its head above water. Pop on over to All About Symbian to read the full article. 2008 is most definitely shaping up to be one killer year for Nokia.

Tong Ren from Symbian Blog has beaten accelerometer app coding maven Samir to the punch with "FlipSilent". A similar program to the much anticipated latest efforts of Samir, ShutUp, that silences a ringing phone with a flip of the device. FlipSilent gives us the ability to not only decline an incoming call, but also put the device in silent mode.

Click through for more details... 

There’s a good discussion in the Convergence Zone over at the S60 blogs that deals with the fact that today’s mobile phones are becoming serious competitors to dedicated cameras and the fact that people are unwilling to accept this. True- camera phones will in all likelihood never completely replace the stand alone digital camera but it certainly offers some features not found in such devices, and rivals the existing features for casual, yet high quality photography. With the added bonus of other converged features such as GPS, direct and fast access to photo sharing resources such as seamless flickr uploading combined with the fact that you don’t have to carry a second device with you, and aren’t likely to do so all day long, every day.

More inside…

 Just saw on Intomobile.com that Stefan has 7 images of a device on flickr very similar in design to the N81 but with a much larger screen, a 5mpix camera and dual slider function labeled N96.

Couple things to note- super glossy like the N81. Fingerprint and grease magnet. It's followed in design from the new N95 variants, lacking proper lens protection. There's a set LED lamps, no xenon flash like we see on the N82.

What do you think? Is this the N96? Should we be expecting more than this?