Nokia's Series 60 Platform has scored another victory - today Matsushita announced that it would license it for its future Symbian-based multimedia phones. Back in May Siemens made the same move, and with Samsung also in the camp Series 60 really is starting to look like the platform - the Windows of the 21st Century, one might say - with Symbian being merely the underlying OS.

We suppose it's progress that OS and UI/apps component are to some extent separately owned here, but the advance of Series 60 is likely, we hear, to inflict a certain collateral damage on Symbian. If phone manufacturers go doing their own apps and clients suites or license them from Nokia, instead of getting the whole shebang from Symbian, then Symbian's per handset revenues are clearly not what they would otherwise have been. And indeed, we hear that the manufacturers are largely voting for this kind of low-cost option.

Says today's Matsushita-Nokia release: "The uniform software design and programming interface will benefit developers through easy access to both the Nokia and Matsushita product platforms. For operators, deployment of the Series 60 Platform means less complexity and enhanced application interoperability." Which kind of reinforces our point, and gives an indicator of where the riches beyond your wildest dreams are going now.

And appropriately enough we've also heard a claimed solution to the who shot Colly Myers puzzle. Begins with N. Can't possibly be true, oh no... ®

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