San Francisco, USA / Espoo, Finland - S60 on Symbian OS, the leading platform for mobile innovation, today announced extended capabilities of its Web Run-Time offering allowing creation of personal and context aware widgets. S60 was the first mobile software platform to support the creation of widgets and this announcement enables web developers to create even more compelling and relevant services. In addition, S60 has expanded choices for open source innovation in native application development through adding support for several popular platform-independent C++ libraries.

“Our expanded Web Run-Time and widget offering has the potential to change the economics of mobile software development. Anyone with Web development experience can now create powerful mobile applications in days or even hours, drastically reducing the cost of development and further expanding the application offering,” said Matti Vänskä, Vice President, Mobile Software Sales and Marketing, Nokia. “In addition, Internet services can be made more powerful and relevant for users by adding personal data such as the current location of the user, through GPS. The user experience from such services goes beyond what the desktop based environments can provide.”

Mobility has fundamentally changed the way people use the Internet. It is personal, always with you and always connected. This is realized by further enhancing the capabilities of widgets - lightweight, Web standards based applications - as they will be able to access S60’s numerous applications and services, such as calendar, contacts, GPS, messaging, audio, video. The widgets can also mash-up information from the Internet together with selected information from the user’s mobile device.

S60 enables the development of exciting new services and mash-ups by combining the power of the Web with power of the S60 platform. For example, a weather widget can now access the user’s current location via the built-in GPS and in just a moment display the latest weather forecasts for that location. The flight tracker widget fetches the user’s itinerary from the airline’s Web site, saves it to the mobile device’s calendar, and sets a reminder. A few hours prior to the travel time, the widget automatically checks for the flight status by getting the flight details from the calendar.