Linux is soon gaining ground in the mobile communications space. Nokia has said that it has joined the non-profit Linux Foundation (LF). The aim of joining the foundation is to work with the LF on Linux-based technologies, including the Nokia Internet Tablet, in a vendor-neutral environment.

Symbian remains a dominant mobile OS, now that might change due to Nokia’s entry into the scene.

The Nokia Open C Plug-In extension for the S60 3rd Edition Software Development Kit (SDK) is designed to help the community of open source applications and developers take their apps and port them to Symbian. Nokia’s S60 platform is built on top of the Symbian OS.

“Why did we develop Open C?” Nokia spokesperson Ravi Belwal said. “We don’t want to reinvent the wheel. We don’t want developers to have to do any extra work in porting their applications.”

“It is not easy to start developing on an S60 and there is a learning curve involved,” Belwal said. “With Open C we have reduced that learning curve, meaning anyone that already has some open source component or application they can easily port to Symbian without having to learn a lot about Symbian the only thing they should understand is C and C++.”

“The recent move by Nokia to more meaningfully engage in the open source community and provide a path for mobile developers is a good one,” Trolltech CTO Benoit Schillings said in a statement sent to internetnews.com. “Open source and open phones are the key to unlocking the next wave of innovation on handsets.”

“When you are developing anything in native Symbian OS, definitely it will be faster than anything that is developed in Open C,” Belwal admitted. “There are performance issues, but as an end user you won’t be able to notice any delays. If you are a developer, maybe you will.”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 11th, 2007 at 9:25 pm and is filed under Cell Phone Applications, Cell Phone. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.