Today Microsoft has officially announced the availability of Silverlight for symbian based mobiles and soon we will see many applications for S60v5 mobiles based on silverlight.
What is Silverlight?
Silverlight is the implementation of .Net framework to develop the rich interactive applications for desktop systems. Because the apps built on silverlight require huge memory to run, so normally it is not possible to view the silvernight content on mobile that have very low memory.
Silverlight for symbian contains a runtime that optimizes the content to display on mobiles. Current version is compatible with S60 5th edition phones like Nokia N97, N97 mini, Nokia 5800 xpressmusic etc.
A beta version of silverlight has already been released for symbain mobiles. At the moment silverlight has got support for default browser only (WebKit-based).
Video Showing Facebook App Running on N97:
IQ blog has released a video showing a testbed app for facebook running on Nokia N97 using the Silverlight SDK for symbian. The video shows the future development of mobile apps based on silverlight.
If you see the whole video, you can imagine the interactivity coming in new apps for symbian mobiles. Soon the dull and text-based apps will be replaced with rich media and interactive ones.
Download Silverlight for Symbian:
Microsoft® Silverlight™ for Symbian – Beta is available for download at Microsoft Download Center. If you install the application, you won’t see any icon but it integrates with default browser of mobiles. I visited different silverbased sites after installing this app, but the browser crashes down due to large sized contents. Hopefully mobile optimized sites based on silverlight will come soon.
