Nokia (News - Alert) said on Tuesday that it plans to make Microsoft’s Silverlight platform available on two of its phone product lines running S60 Symbian OS—Series 40 devices and Nokia Intenet tablets.

 

The company is adding support for Silverlight—a cross-platform plug-in for next-generation, interactive media—to expand the possibilities for developers creating multi-platform apps who want to deliver their products in a consistent and reliable manner.

 

Lee Williams, senior vice president at Nokia’s device software division, noted that consumers want easy access to tightly integrated services and data, regardless of which device they’re using.

 

“Nokia's software strategy is based on cross-platform development environments, enabling the creation of rich applications across the Nokia device range,” Williams said in a statement. “Nokia aims to support market leading and content rich Internet application environments and to embrace and encourage open innovation. By working with Microsoft (News - Alert), we are creating terrific opportunities and additional choices for the development community, S60 licensees and the industry as a whole.”

 

Nokia said in its announcement that Silverlight is currently in use as the technology behind thousands of applications. Entertainment Tonight, the National Basketball Association (NBA) and NBC Universal all use the platform. The global reach of Silverlight gets a definite boost as Nokia adds support for it.

 

“This is a significant step in gaining broad acceptance for Silverlight and ensuring it is platform agnostic,” said S. Somasegar (News - Alert), senior vice president at Microsoft's developer division, in a statement. “This is critical since we want to make sure developers and designers don't have to constantly recreate the wheel and build different versions of applications and services for multiple operating systems, browsers and platforms.”

 

Bola Rotibi, an analyst at Ovum (News - Alert), added that there is a strong market for Web-based services across all device types, but developing such solutions can be a challenge.

 

“For Microsoft this extends Silverlight to a broader range of vendors, platforms and devices,” Rotibi said of the deal. “For Nokia it expands the Web runtime options on its devices, enabling a wider community of developers and more applications. This should help the  uptake of higher speed mobile services and advance a new era of anytime, anywhere device-based computing.”