S60 extending the lead in Internet innovation and experiences

Internet services extend beyond desktop experiences with context aware and personal Widgets

San Francisco, USA / Espoo, Finland - S60 on Symbian OS, the leading platform for mobile innovation, today announced extended capabilities of its Web Run-Time offering allowing creation of personal and context aware widgets. S60 was the first mobile software platform to support the creation of widgets and this announcement enables web developers to create even more compelling and relevant services. In addition, S60 has expanded choices for open source innovation in native application development through adding support for several popular platform-independent C++ libraries.

“Our expanded Web Run-Time and widget offering has the potential to change the economics of mobile software development. 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,” said Matti Vänskä, Vice President, Mobile Software Sales and Marketing, Nokia. “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.”

Mobility has fundamentally changed the way people use the Internet. It is personal, always with you and always connected. This is realized by further enhancing the capabilities of widgets - lightweight, Web standards based applications - as they will be able to access S60’s numerous applications and services, such as calendar, contacts, GPS, messaging, audio, video. The widgets can also mash-up information from the Internet together with selected information from the user’s mobile device.

S60 enables the development of exciting new services and mash-ups by combining the power of the Web with power of the S60 platform. For example, a weather widget can now access the user’s current location via the built-in GPS and in just a moment display the latest weather forecasts for that location. The flight tracker widget fetches the user’s itinerary from the airline’s Web site, saves it to the mobile device’s calendar, and sets a reminder. A few hours prior to the travel time, the widget automatically checks for the flight status by getting the flight details from the calendar.

“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,” said Chris Brozenick, VP of Product, WeatherBug. “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.”

To support the S60 software strategy and cross platform development, S60 is also expanding its support for open source innovation through support for Open C++. This support brings the Standard Template Library and other popular platform-independent C++ libraries to the S60 platform, extending the Open C offering that was announced last year. Together, Open C and Open C++ create opportunities for developers to utilize existing skills and code from other platforms in their S60 development projects, including open source components targeted at Linux and other platforms.

S60 on Symbian OS is the world’s leading smartphone software, is under continuous development by Nokia and licensed by some of the industry’s top mobile device manufacturers. With this announcement, S60 is reinforces its market leadership, already at more than 53% (Canalys) share of global converged device shipments. Over 150 million S60 devices have cumulatively been shipped by all S60 licensees, with 75 device models addressing the widest range of segments and price points launched to date.