Nokia just announced its plans to make Microsoft Silverlight available for S60 on Symbian OS, as well as for Series 40 devices and Nokia Internet tablets. The support for Silverlight will broaden opportunities for developers to create rich-featured, interactive applications that can run on multiple platforms in a reliable way.

"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."

Microsoft's Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in that provides next-generation media experiences and rich interactive applications, including vector graphics, animation and audio-video playback. The plug-in is already used in thousands of applications and organizations around the world, including Entertainment Tonight, the NBA and NBC Universal (delivering advanced Web-based experiences to their customers). Nokia's arrangement with Microsoft will considerably extend the reach of Silverlight by making it available for hundred of millions of handsets.

"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," said S. Somasegar, Senior Vice President of Microsoft's Developer Division. "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."

Microsoft will demonstrate Silverlight on S60 phones during the opening keynote at Microsoft's MIX08 conference in Las Vegas (March the 5th). Silverlight will be available to S60 developers later in 2008 with initial service delivery expected shortly thereafter for all S60 licensees. This way, S60 application developers will be able to use an even wider range of development environments for S60 than today, when they use C++, S60 Web Run-time (with support for technologies like Ajax, JavaScript, HTML and CSS), Flash Lite from Adobe, the Java language and Python.

The availability of Microsoft Silverlight for Nokia Series 40 handsets and Nokia Internet tablets will be announced later this year.