“I’m very clear on his expectations,” she said in a telephone interview from Finland the week of Nokia’s big announcement. “His expectations are certainly for 2011 to be the launch date.”

However, Harlow said that more important than the date is what Nokia can bring to the table in terms of features and quality.

And as massive as that task is, it’s not the only one facing Harlow. Even as she plots the move to Windows Phone 7, Harlow will also have to try to breathe life into Symbian, an operating system that, despite being end-of-lifed, will be critical to keeping the company in the smartphone business while it waits for its Windows Phone product line to get up to speed. The company has said it expects to sell another 150 million Symbian devices in the coming years. Even with that, Nokia has indicated that it is in for rough times financially both this year and next.

“We have to continue to make Symbian competitive,” Harlow said, adding that will include improving the operating system’s user interface and the hardware that it runs on, not to mention trying to keep all of the operating system’s developers from abandoning ship.

In addition to managing the product transitions, Harlow is also faced with overseeing a big shift in how the company works.

“This is a significant change to our culture of being able to do things ourselves,” Harlow said, adding that its newfound partner has been, for many years, viewed as a competitor.

While Elop has put a largely happy face on the decision to embrace Windows Phone, Harlow admitted that the move, although necessary, was a tough pill to swallow. Even as the company evaluated external options such as Windows Phone and Android, many people were hopeful the company would find a strategy that would allow it to compete on its own.

“Coming to the conclusion that we didn’t believe that was possible was extremely painful,” Harlow said. That pain, is now being shared by the company’s full workforce, she said, adding that she was not at all surprised with the outcry that followed the company’s decision.

“If I were in their shoes, with the amount of information and time (they had), I would feel very uncertain, very concerned,” she said.

Having had more time to digest the move, and get to know Microsoft, Harlow said she has been impressed with the company’s commitment to mobile and the speed with which it is evolving.

Harlow admits the company missed out in the past few years as the center of the phone universe shifted to the U.S. from Europe and Asia.

“The U.S. has become the heartbeat of smartphones,” she said. “That sometimes is difficult to capture when all of your development from an experience perspective is happening elsewhere in the world.”

Although the company has a modest presence in Silicon Valley, much of its strategy and technical development has taken place in Europe. The products that the company attempted to bring to the U.S. attracted little interest from American cell phone carriers, leaving the company dependent on sales outside North America.

Even in those markets, Nokia has been losing ground as Android and the iPhone become increasingly strong.

Nonetheless, Harlow rejects the idea that Symbian sales will evaporate overnight in the wake of the decision to go with Windows Phone 7. While tech enthusiasts follow every word on where the company is headed, many consumers make their decision based entirely on what they see on store shelves. And that, she said, will be a wide array of Nokia phones running Symbian.

“Millions of consumers are oblivious to the announcements that we have made,” she said. Those consumers value Nokia’s brand, she said, and will continue to by devices provided the company keeps making competitive products.

Harlow, who already spent a lot of time shuttling between Finland and the United Kingdom, where she headed Symbian development, says the travel schedule will increase as she adds more stops in Seattle.

“I hope BA (British Airways) has a frequent flier card up to the challenge,” she said.

Etacts, which participated in the Y Combinator program earlier this year, offered a free Web app and plug-ins that helped Gmail and IMAP users manage their email relationships by showing information about their contacts’ social Web activity and communication history.

The start-up, co-founded by recent Duke grads Howie Liu and Evan Beard, had raised $650,000 in funding from Ron Conway of SV Angels, Eric Hahn of Inventures Group, Jim Young from Hot or Not, Lorenzo Thione and Barney Pell from Powerset, Joshua Schachter from Delicious, and YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim. And I believe Ashton Kutcher was involved as well.

Etacts will no longer accept user sign-ups as of today and will delete all user data effective January 31, it said in an email sent to users.

Etacts’s product was quite similar to that of another Y Combinator company, Rapportive. Salesforce also just bought another YC company this month, Heroku, for $212 million in cash.

CBS (CBS) says it has locked up AT&T (T) Coke (KO) and General Motors’ (GM) Pontiac as “presenting sponsors.” And Comcast (CMCSA) is paying to associate itself with the Webcast’s “boss button,” which you’re supposed to hit if one of your remaining superiors waddles by your cube while you’re watching the Duke game.

Chris Albrecht at NewTeeVee thinks CBS will need to take some of that extra dough and plow it right back into bandwidth bills, since the company is using a high-end player from Microsoft (MSFT) to stream the games this year. I’m not so sure about that–last I looked, Microsoft was still trying to persuade companies to use its player instead of Adobe’s (ADBE) Flash, and I have to believe it’d be willing to make it worth CBS’s while to do so.