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Developers for the World's Most-Used Smartphone OS, Rejoice!

Not Windows, Palm or RIM developers, but developers for Symbian Series 60 now have the brand new Feature Pack 2 to help them enhance mobile applications for the S60 3rd Edition smartphone platform. Too bad most U.S. smartphone users won't benefit from it.

According to Nokia, the new Feature Pack 2 was created to help spur innovation, facilitate application development and accelerate performance on mid-range devices. This is all applaudable and I am sure European and Asian smartphone users (i.e., those who use certain Nokia and Sony Ericsson handsets) will get a lot of out of the application innovations in the somewhat-near future.

The news doesn't mean much for U.S. smartphone users, though, because most of them are using RIM-, Palm- or Windows-based smartphones, such as a BlackBerry or Treo. Only a few Symbian enterprise-grade devices are even available in the U.S. (the Nokia 9300, E62 and Sony Ericsson P910, to name a few), which is a real shame. The Symbian devices I've used have been a pleasure to work with.

Still, part of Nokia's goal with the Feature Pack 2 release is to make it easier to mobilize applications. Part of the enhancement was in making Open C available to the C++ development environment, bringing familiar standard C functions to the S60 libraries. With Open C, developers can reuse existing code and focus on the mobility aspects of their applications.

According to an InformationWeek poll of 325 business technology professionals, 64% use BlackBerry smartphones while 63% use Windows devices and 45% use Palm-powered handsets and PDAs.

The U.S. market is quite different than the world market, where Symbian dominates. Globally, Symbian accounts for 72.8% of global smartphone units sold globally.

Focusing on mobility. That sounds good. There's no question that a lot enterprise users can benefit from mobilized applications, allowing them to accomplish more on their devices while away from the office. It would be nice to see some of the innovations available on Symbian-based platforms find their way to more U.S. smartphones.

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