Series 60 with new browser - game over for UIQ

A web browser is not everything but is a damn good advantage - especially if you need to build a new mobile phone and get it somewhere. Of course add a few more bucks to your project - but if you don’t need to spend these bucks?Nokia shows itself more competitive than ever and playing hard in many fronts people thought they were loosing ground, Nokia is in my opinion re-inventing itself – and its better than ever.At the Symbian level, the cult Symbian UIQ seemed to finally take off and gain breath for a long run. Now, slowly getting out of breath it got another shake from the big and fat grandpa – Nokia, the largest shareholder at Symbian with 48%. It was expected. Nobody is stupid enough to pay a competitors product development, or? Nevertheless, things are not that simple. The death of UIQ will be slow, if nobody gets it first – this is only about politics, of course.

The fact that Nokia S60 has another gap filled in is just a bad new for the Swedish subsidiary - their Customers can only get this type of functionality through Opera - but they have to pay extra for it, find another provider, or simply, develop it itself. So, if you would need you pick one who would you choose.For the network carriers, this is only good news - the biggest mobile phone seller having a default browser, with screen rendering, will almost end the need to deploy specific solutions of its portals to facilitate the end users an easy navigation though its premium services.For the developer community this is also good news. Nokia adopting de facto open source applications will probably boost their interest on the platform. There are many players who win with this and probably the only looser is UIQ.

Nokia’s browser is based on WebCore and JavaScriptCore components of Apple's Safari Web Kit, the open source full Web rendering engine for mobile devices. Based on KHTML and KJS from KDE's Konqueror open source project, Nokia offers S60 licensees the re-use of screen rendering developed and optimized by the open source community. The new browser has features like preservation of the original page layout; easy navigation of web pages through page miniatures, thus reducing the amount of scrolling; pop-up blocking, enhanced start page, and simplified menus. It also has features like visual history, a back function showing miniature views of previous pages; text Search, which works as you type, taking you directly to the interesting part of the page; and web feeds providing easy access to RSS feeds from Web sites, blogs, and news stories.

See Series 60 website