Another update on news and items of interest to the Symbian OS mobile developer community via this latest edition of the SymbianOne Monitor newsletter. 

Introduction from this edition of the Monitor... 

The latest from the Symbian ecosystem... - An interesting announcement today as Samsung is the latest company to toss their hat in the ring, joining Sonny Ericsson and others as a major sponsor/supported of the NAVTEQ LBS Challenge. A very interesting move to help bolster the innovation that we've seen out of this fine Global competition, particularly as the event is put on by Nokia owned NAVTEQ, a Global leader in the LBS space. As a Global Sponsor, Samsung will provide comprehensive support to participants throughout the competition. Qualifying contestants will receive the Samsung INNOV8 (i8510) and software tools to enable the development of location-based services (LBS) applications. Reminder, see also Samsung's new developer portal for mobile innovators (see this list of Dev Programs). Gain access to a knowledge base, discussion boards, testing tools, and even submit business proposals using their new business development service.

Moving on to last week's main stories, seems that Nokia decided to jump into the spotlight with a number of BIG announcements from the Nokia Remix, London event - I think my invite got lost in the mail... ;0( - including the introduction of the way cool Express Music 5800, Symbian OS Touch UI device with the big selling option of bundling with the pioneering Comes with Music digital entertainment service which offers consumers a new way to discover and enjoy music - all for one low, annual fee - all the music you want for a year, you keep it, it's all yours! It's no wonder that Nokia is chasing the lucrative music marketplace as the company reported that with more than 10 million units sold globally since its introduction last year, the Nokia 5310 XpressMusic is the best selling music phone in the world!

Perhaps most relevant in the news though is the fact that the 5800 is the first Nokia device released based on the S60 5th edition and boasts the way cool and much desired touch UI. Nokia notes that S60 5th Edition brings new, advanced multimedia and Internet experiences to devices with touch user interfaces and sensor technologies - S60 5th Edition SDK and tools available for software developers. The implementation of the S60 Web Runtime in S60 5th Edition adds support for S60 Platform Services, which enables creation of personal and context aware Web widgets. Platform Services gives these Web standards based applications access to numerous applications and features of the S60 platform, such as calendar, contacts, GPS, messaging, audio, and video.

To lower the barrier to entry for new innovation, S60 5th Edition is also expanding its support for open source technologies through integrated support for Open C++. This support brings the Standard Template Library and other popular platform-independent C++ libraries to the S60 platform, extending the Open C offering. It should be interesting to see the next-generation Symbian devices based on S60 5 rolling out over the next several months, no doubt a hot topic at the coming Nokia Open World event!

(Intro provided by Glenn Letham @glenn95 /Jaiku; @gletham / Twitter)

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