Thursday, 6 March 2008

Nokia to Power Smartphones with Silverlight

Nokia yesterday revealed plans to make Microsoft Silverlight available on some of its devices to cater to a market demand for rich, Web-based services across a variety of device types.

Initially offering this service on its S60 on Symbian OS, as well for Series 40 devices and Nokia Internet tablets, the world’s leading mobile phone maker said that adding support for Silverlight will extend opportunities for developers to create rich, interactive applications that run on multiple platforms in a consistent and reliable way.

Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering next-generation media experiences and rich interactive applications.

"Today's consumers are very clear in what they want: easy access to tightly integrated services and data on any device," said Lee Williams, Senior Vice President in Nokia's Devices software organization.

"Nokia's software strategy is based on cross-platform development environments, enabling the creation of rich applications across the Nokia device range. Nokia aims to support market leading and content rich internet application environments and to embrace and encourage open innovation. By working with Microsoft, we are creating terrific opportunities and additional choices for the development community, S60 licensees and the industry as a whole."

Silverlight is already powering thousands of applications around the world and organizations including Entertainment Tonight, the NBA and NBC Universal and the arrangement with Nokia is set to substantially extend its the reach by making the platform available for hundreds of millions of devices.

"This is an important relationship on so many levels. Working with Nokia means we are easily able to reach a huge number of mobile users, including customers of all S60 licensees. This is a significant step in gaining broad acceptance for Silverlight and ensuring it is platform agnostic. This is critical since we want to make sure developers and designers don't have to constantly recreate the wheel and build different versions of applications and services for multiple operating systems, browsers and platforms," said S. Somasegar, Senior Vice President of Microsoft's Developer Division.

"For Microsoft this extends Silverlight to a broader range of vendors, platforms and devices. For Nokia it expands the web runtime options on its devices, enabling a wider community of developers and more applications. This should help the uptake of higher speed mobile services and advance a new era of anytime, anywhere device-based computing", said Bola Rotibi , Principal Analyst at Ovum.

Silverlight is intended to be available to S60 developers later this year with initial service delivery anticipated shortly thereafter for all S60 licensees.