Nokia Improves the S60 Platform's Web Capabilities

Nokia announced that its S60 Symbian mobile platform just got better, with the addition of enhanced capabilities for Web Run-Time, enabling users to create both context aware and personal widgets. Moreover, S60 now comes with support for various platform-independent C++ libraries, offering a greater freedom for open source implementations in native software development. With the new improvements, S60 (the first mobile platform to provide support for widget creation) will allow the development of new, better and more comprehensive services.

"Our expanded Web Run-Time and widget offering has the potential to change the economics of mobile software development," says Matti Vänskä, Vice President, Mobile Software Sales and Marketing, Nokia. "Anyone with Web development experience can now create powerful mobile applications in days or even hours, drastically reducing the cost of development and further expanding the application offering. In addition, Internet services can be made more powerful and relevant for users by adding personal data such as the current location of the user, through GPS. The user experience from such services goes beyond what the desktop based environments can provide."

The new widgets will provide easy access to S60's services and applications (like contacts, messaging, calendar or GPS). Also, the widgets will be able to combine Web information with data from the phone they run on. A weather widget, for example, can interact with the user's phone, find its location through the integrated GPS (assuming the handset has GPS, of course), and display the weather forecasts for that location.

Chris Brozenick, VP of Product, WeatherBug, said: "As an early adopter of the S60 Web Run-Time platform, we have found it easy to migrate and port our popular desktop WeatherBug widget and extend our live, local weather content to mobile, utilizing the latest Web technologies from Nokia. We also have been able to leverage the S60 Platform Services to deliver context-aware weather data along with partner information, such as local movies and restaurants. This truly enables us to leverage mobility to the maximum and enhance the overall usability and user experience of our widget."