“Nokia’s smartphone market share has declined from 68.5 percent in mid-2007 to 44.3 percent by the first quarter of 2010”, reported Kevin Tofel on GigaOM, and reportedly seeking a new CEO according to many news sources. The mobile platforms market is getting hot after iPhone, Android, and WebOS, the competition entered a crucial stage and left Nokia with Symbian behind.
PhoneGap Symbian
This week Nitobi and Symbian announced at Oscon their partnership to simplify mobile application development by integrating Symbian’s web application creation tools and Nitobi’s PhoneGap. PhoneGap will now be included as part of the web extensions package in the Symbian^3 platform.
With both of these developments in place, any web developer who knows HTML, CSS and JavaScript can now write a mobile application once and deploy it across multiple operating systems and devices. In addition, developers can access native device capabilities such as telephony, contacts, camera, accelerometers, orientation and location that can be modified or enhanced to improve the end user experience and device functionality.


“This is a great partnership that will benefit app developers across the globe. For the thousands of apps that have been built using PhoneGap, developers now have the option of developing one app which will run across all platforms, including Symbian,” said Lee Williams, Executive Director of Symbian. “At the same time, our web tools allow developers on other platforms to quickly build rich Internet-based apps for Symbian and access the world’s largest smartphone market.”
If you’re new to PhoneGap, it’s worth checking out. PhoneGap is an open source development framework for building cross-platform mobile apps that run on Symbian as well as iPhone/iTouch/iPad, Google Android, Palm and Blackberry. The PhoneGap open source code has been downloaded more than 250K times and there are thousands of PhoneGap apps in app stores and directories.
Maybe Symbian could be saved, but not sure about Nokia.
Full press release available here.