Nokia's Big Giveaway (and purchase!)

I know I harp on about non computer devices, but while it's now estimated that there are a billion PCs of all sorts in the world, there are probably 4 billion mobile phones. Sooner or later more people will use the internet by phone than by computer. A big move in that direction today is the announcement that Nokia is buying up Symbian Ltd and then giving it away as the non profit Symbian Foundation! The idea is to move the Symbian operating system down from PDas etc into mobile phones by converging the Symbian OS and S60 with selected UIQ and MOAP(S) technologies into a single Symbian Foundation platform. Developing for this will be be royalty-free as the Symbian Foundation is a non-profit organization. The platform code will be free for all and is expected to be released next year.

For developers this means a single point of access for developer support, with free tools and resources including SDKs, dcomumentation, sample code etc for C (POSIX) and C++ (POSIX and Symbian), as well as Silverlight.

• Link to C++ Tutorials
• Link to all about Operating Systems