News.com claims that Microsoft and Nokia are going to announce at Mix 08 that Silverlight for Symbian OS Series 60 will be released "later this year". This seems like a match made in heaven -- a light, compact, powerful version of .NET (I'm assuming that it will be SL 2.0...) on mobile devices.
It certainly won't be trivial to create -- Silverlight's efficiency comes from some highly-optimized platform-specific modules, and there's a metric myriad of hardware platforms running Series 60. Symbian OS greatly abstracts the hardware, but at a significant performance cost, so my suspicion is that the portions of Silverlight for S60 will have to be written using device drivers -- fun fun fun for Microsoft/Nokia.
It is a bit curious, though, that Symbian OS might be poised to beat Windows Mobile to Silverlight...? Combine that with Red5's "Net60" .NET runtime on Symbian OS, and Symbian appears to have a bit of a technology bump over WinMo. Should be interesting to see what pans out in the next 18 months to 2 years.
Posted
Mar 04 2008, 08:39 AM
by
mike-henderson