Fansite of Nokia professional training

Thanks to a (probably lucrative) deal between giants Nokia and Microsoft, Silverlight will soon be available at a Nokia smartphone near you.

Silverlight is Microsoft’s answer to Adobe’s ubiquitous Flash player, a platform that brings so-called “rich media” like videos, games, etc to your browser. While the terms of the deal with Nokia weren’t disclosed, Silverlight will start appearing on Symbian S60 devices, Series 40 phones and Internet Tablets.

Never mind that Adobe’s push into the mobile market (Nokia and Adobe have a separate agreement that brought the Flash player to Symbian smartphones) hasn’t exactly been much of a success. The reason for this, at least according to a Yahoo! news article, is Adobe’s licensing structure:

“While Adobe gives its Flash plugin away to consumers for free on computers — and Nokia smartphones, through a 2005 licensing deal — it’s tried to get mobile phone manufacturers and/or carriers to pay a license fee for each phone it’s installed on. That’s limited its market share, and peoples’ interest in developing Flash content for phones — and could help Microsoft’s rival Silverlight catch on.”

I personally have never used the Flash player on any Symbian phone I’ve owned, simply because there’s no compelling reason to. I can’t really think of anything Flash-exclusive that couldn’t be done better with an actual Symbian application or (dare I say it) Java.

Then again, that’s also why I probably won’t be using Silverlight, either. I do like the name though.

Microsoft Goes After Adobe with Nokia Deal

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 5th, 2008 at 10:15 pm and is filed under Nokia cellphone. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will be moderated but will appear as soon as humanly possible.