The Forum Nokia Open C Challenge, which offers $20,000 in prizes for the best application developed using Nokia's Open C libraries for Series 60 programming, along with POSIX for the Symbian bits, is now open to registrations.

Porting of existing applications is encouraged, as is developing something completely new. The best submission gets $10,000 with three runners up receiving $5,000, $3,000 and $2,000 respectively.

The ability to run native applications on smartphones is generally very under-utilised. But the increase in data services such as VoIP and streaming video is starting to show the advantages of an open platform, and Nokia obviously feels that a competition will drive more open source developers to explore it.

Open source developers are a little spoiled for choice right now - with the OpenMoko finally available they might feel more inclined towards a platform which itself utilises an open ideal.

But it's hard to deny that Symbian S60 is a significant platform, and anything which encourages innovation in mobile application development is to be applauded. ®

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