Nokia announced plans to make Microsoft Silverlight available for S60 on Symbian OS, the smartphone software, as well as for Series 40 devices and Nokia Internet tablets. You can use your S60 phone for a whole lot more than just calling. You can turn it into a dictionary, navigator, city guide, news reader, and more! Quality applications are available for download from several websites , or you can just click Download! on your compatible Nokia phone to find, try, and buy these applications over-the-air.

    "Today's consumers are very clear in what they want: easy access to tightly integrated services and data on any device," noted 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 a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering next-generation media experiences and rich interactive applications. Silverlight is already powering thousands of applications around the world and organizations including Entertainment Tonight, the NBA and NBC Universal to deliver superior Web-based experiences to their customers.

    S60 keeps you connected to online communities, such as Flickr, VOX, and others. Take a photo and then instantly share it with friends and family in your favorite community. With S60 smartphones, you can also stay connected with popular instant messaging services on the go. These applications may be built-in to your phone, or you can download them easily. The arrangement with Nokia will substantially extend the reach of Silverlight by making the platform available for hundreds of millions of devices, including S60 on Symbian smartphones from a range of manufacturers, as well as Nokia Series 40 devices and Nokia Internet tablets.

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

    Microsoft will demonstrate Silverlight on S60 during the opening keynote at Microsoft's MIX08 conference on March 5 in Las Vegas. Silverlight is intended to be available to S60 developers later this year with initial service delivery anticipated shortly thereafter for all S60 licensees. 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.

    This will allow S60 application developers to use an even wider range of development environments for S60 on Symbian OS than today. Today S60 developers can use: C++ (using native Symbian OS APIs and Open C providing subset of standard POSIX libraries), S60 Web Run-time (supporting standards-based web technologies such as Ajax, JavaScript, CSS and HTML), the Java language, Flash Lite from Adobe, and Python.