Silverlight Coming to Mobile Phones

At Microsoft's MIX08 Web developers' conference in Las Vegas, the company announced that its Silverlight rich-media platform will be available on some Nokia smartphones beginning this year.Silverlight will be demo'ed on one of Nokia's S60 phones at the show. According to Nokia, "The arrangement ... will substantially extend the reach of Silverlight by making the platform available for hundreds of millions of devices."

The partnership exemplifies the volatility of the mobile technology landscape. The smartphones in question run on the Symbian operating system, not on Windows Mobile, and feature a custom Nokia interface that Nokia also licenses to LG Electronics, Lenovo, and Samsung. Silverlight is generally viewed as Microsoft's rival to Adobe Flash, a version of which (Flash Lite) is already available on the S60 smartphones.InternetNews.com