When Apple announced earlier this month that it had sold over 100 million iPods, the news was greeted as something of a cultural milestone. Today, Nokia has announced that over 100 million smartphones and other devices running its S60 platform have shipped worldwide…and the fact the announcement will probably amount to little more than a ripple is an indication of just how much larger the mobile phone business is compared to the portable music player business.
"This announcement represents a significant landmark for S60," said Nokia sales and marketing VP Matti Vaenskae, in a statement. "We believe it inspires further innovation on S60. The open platform gives mobile users more choice and provides a platform upon which new applications and services can be built."
Nokia has been working hard on the S60 platform and encouraging developers to build custom mobile applications—and they’ve been meeting with considerable success, with the S60 shipping on an estimated 54 percent of smartphones worldwide from both Nokia and and major partners LG and Samsung. S60 was the first mobile platform with integrated widget support, and enables developers to build on Web services using tools like CSS, HTML, Javascript, and Ajax. The new S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2 finally brings Open C and the standard C function libraries to the S60 (enabling developers to more quickly leverage existing standard C code).
The S60 platform’s competition comes mainly from Windows Mobile and Linux, along with proprietary solutions like RIM’s BlackBerry and the PalmOS…although Palm recently announced a shift to Linux.
