 At CTIA Red Five Labs announced, along with a couple of licensing agreements, that Net60 will be available commercially from 28 April. This news has gone largely unheralded, but could shake up the Symbian application landscape.
The impact of Net60 is unlikely to be immediate, but it could be significant. S60 devices have been largely off limits for those developers who have made .NET the basis of their development strategy. Moving their applications to S60 would have involved retraining and recoding, which, despite the opportunity offered by the volume of S60 devices, was a significant barrier.
Net60 does not necessarily make the move to S60 devices entirely seamless, as developers could have used specific Windows functions in their code. It does however make the move practically achievable, with some coding effort. It therefore has the potential to unleash a large number of Microsoft developers and their applications into the Symbian ecosystem.
This is good news for Symbian. Nokia already makes much of the fact that S60 offers developers the widest range of runtimes of any mobile platform: Net60 expands that range into the domain of dedicated Microsoft developers. While the ordinary application buying public will undoubtedly benefit from an expansion in choice, the biggest impact could be in the enterprise space. The many internal development shops that rely heavily on Microsoft development technology now have an easier route to S60 devices.
The challenge for Red Five Labs will be developing Net60 as the S60 platform embraces touch technology. Even so, this is certainly a technology to watch as its impact on the availability of applications for S60 devices could be significant.
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