Richard Leggett on New Media

In a press release today Nokia announced that Symbian OS will include Silverlight. This includes both high-end S60, and low-end series 40. Silverlight is of course the cross-platform RIA runtime from Microsoft, that can be considered a subset of WPF (at least with version 2.0 which has a substantial feature list).

I wonder if Microsoft charged a per-device license fee to Nokia like Adobe did, and if so what the difference is. On top of that there was of course the controversial price to pay for the developer edition of the Flash Lite runtime for Series 60 which is thankfully now free. Clearly there is a fierce competition to be had in this space as the web continues to leak out onto what we currently call “devices", and Microsoft have made it crystal clear Silverlight is high on their list of priorities.

Personally I see Windows Mobile taking a bit of a dive with the strong competition from RIM and Symbian, and more interestingly Google’s Android which I have extremely high hopes for. With that in mind, it’s sensible for Microsoft to find alternate, more up-to-date platforms for continued expansion, and just like the Flash Platform, a ubiquitous WPF/Silverlight stack would provide this.