Nokia has announced that it will hold its annual Nokia World conference from October 26th through the 27th in London. Given Nokia’s recent announcement that it’s still on-track to launch a Windows Phone this year, it’s entirely plausible that Stephen Elop will take the stage during Nokia World and do just that. An October announcement could mean that the new phone will land on store shelves right in time for the holiday season, too. Nokia has listed France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, England, and Spain as the first six countries that will receive the first Windows Phone, so it may not land in the United States as quickly. The Finnish firm also said it will launch 10 new Symbian devices over the next 12 months, and we’ll likely hear more about those devices soon, too.

[Via PCMag]

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A late night burglary at a Vodafone technical facility in the UK has affected the service of “several hundred thousand” users. Via its forums, the company explained:

We had a break in last night at one of our technical facilities which resulted in damage done to some of our equipment. This means that some customers may be experiencing temporary loss of voice, sms and internet services. We are working quickly to restore these and will be back to normal as soon as we can. There has been no impact on the privacy of customers’ data.

In a subsequent FAQ post, Vodafone confirms that the vandalized site was in Basingstoke, the event occurred between 1:00AM and 2:00AM GMT, and that “specialist network equipment and IT hardware was stolen.”

The company expects its services to be fully restored by this afternoon. Any of UK readers experience this outage?

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The Times of London is reporting that Jonathan Ive, Apple’s senior vice president of product design, could be itching to cash out his Apple’s option grant from 2008 and move with his wife and two kids to the UK. If the article is accurate, Ive’s options are worth about $30 million and would ring up his net worth to around $128 million. The paper quotes a friend of the Ives as saying:

Unfortunately he is just too valuable to Apple and they told him in no uncertain terms that if he headed back to England he would not be able to sustain his position with them … It’s a shame. We hardly ever see anyone at the house.

An Apple spokesperson wouldn’t comment on the option grant part of the story and deemed Jonathan Ive’s desire to move to England as “speculation.”

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At the same event where Google introduced voice calling in Gmail, the search giant also announced that it would be placing Google Voice phone booths in select U.S. locations. The GV stations, which will closely resemble the iconic red telephone booths in the U.K., will begin appearing on college campuses and in airports in the next few weeks. The purpose of the old-fashioned booths is to get people more acquainted with Google Voice, allowing them to see how GV’s voice call-quality compares with more traditional landline services. Google said they would release more details about the telephone-towers in the coming weeks.

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Have you been keeping those fingers crossed, chums? If this rumor sticks it looks like the long a grueling wait for Palm Pre launch details is almost over. Well, it’s been less than a month since Palm’s first webOS-powered handset launched here in the US so we’re not exactly sure that classifies as long and grueling, but you get the idea. Word from our pals across the pond suggests Palm has pegged next week — possibly Tuesday, July 7th we hear — for the official Palm Pre announcement in the UK. If history has taught us anything, much will likely remain a mystery even Palm if Palm does make its announcement next week but at least merry old England will be one step closer to having the Pre see the light of day. Beyond that, ummm, well, ummm, uhhhh… We’re sorry, we got distracted be the prospect of an imported, unlocked GSM Pre. Anyone?

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