Microsoft has signed a deal with Nokia to bring its Silverlight platform to millions of mobile phones. If you are wondering what on earth Silverlight is, it is essentially a browser plugin that enables rich web content such as animation, vector graphics, and audio-video playback.
Allowing the software to run on the Symbian operating system on Nokia mobiles marks an extremely aggressive push for Microsoft into the mobile web space as well as what might be the beginning of the end for watered down, clunky mobile web browsing. The union is also an unlikely consolidation of efforts between two companies that have been competing in various areas of mobile technology.
Apparently Microsoft is still working on a mobile version of Silverlight for its own Windows Mobile platform; clearly the lure of such an intimidating chunk of handset market share was simply too tantalizing for the big M to pass up and so has tendered the software out to Nokia in favour of trying to go it alone.
The first device to benefit from the partnership will be, predictably, the N96. Big news indeed folks, though it is worth noting that Adobe is hardly a lightweight competitor to be challenging so late in the game with something in the region of 450 million devices already using its Flash Lite plugin.
There are other unanswered questions, chief among them being; is this deal set to remain exclusive to Nokia S60 devices or will Nokia allow Samsung and LG (which make use of Nokia’s S60 platform along with Lenovo and Panasonic) get in on the action at some stage too? We don’t have the answer for that yet but either way, this could be the start of something big in terms of Microsoft’s ambitions in the mobile industry.
(Via BBC)
0 Responses to “Breaking news: Microsoft and Nokia targeting mobile internet together”