How much did Nokia get paid and is it legal to bundle silverlight and pay companies to ship it in competition....

I'm reminded of the Netscape debacle where MS paid ISPs to get their users to switch from Netscape to free IE. Effectively negative cost.

I have used JavaME in the past for devices. While it is limited in what it can do for mobile phone form based applications - what is available worked great.

FlashLite, mentioned as an alternative in the article, is nothing short of buggy crap. It's no fun writing the same application 4 times trying to find the API's in FlashLite that don't fall over on the device when in their device emulator it worked just fine.

Hopefully Silverlight and/or JavaFX will provide some much needed improvements in this area. Cautious optimism....

Sun's Answer to flash has already been lapped.

adding ms software to a symbian device by default means that my next phone will not be a nokia! get a fucking clue nokia. ms are not your friends!

S60 on my N73 runs slower than Vista on a "Vista Ready 2007 (tm)" laptop.

Silverlight will just make it slower, and now potentially even more unstable.

Actually... saying this... my N73 now reminds me of my XDA II...

it's not the end of the world... Flash is already on them, and flash is just as shit - as is RealPlayer and flickr plugin's etc etc....

It's not going to be running by default 100% of the time - that would be stupid, and I can't believe techies would assume that installed=running/crashing, they just spent months improving stability and battery life in the v20 n95 update, they wont just mess it all up at the whim of m$.

I think this is meant to be more of a slap in the face to the iPhone, because any mobile-aimed website built on silverlight that becomes remotely popular will be a 1-up for m$ and Nokia over Apple. Apple will refuse to port it because of "security concerns" - then a year later there will be a new rich-web-application-builder called iLoveWeb or something equally annoying.

Paris - cos she is the nearest thing to an Android on there, which is what my next phone will be running in 2 years! :)

Adobe has a monopoly on Flash, and neglect the platforms that matter. Companies have to go cap in hand to Adobe with an open wallet to get support for their platforms, and all because Adobe can pick and choose where *IT* want it's technology to be... the lack of a credible open source Flash Player has harmed Adobe otherwise I think device manufacturers would be showing more loyalty to Adobe at this time. As it is, they're sick and tired of Adobe's arrogance and wilful neglect of new technology and the power they wield, hence the support now being shown to Microsoft as an alternative which should put a fcking fire under Adobe's arse and get them pro actively innovating on all fronts. Adobe AIR/Flex may be more open than Flash, and may have cross platform support but Adobe could well have already burned their bridges.

Ultimately, I don't care if Silverlight is by Microsoft or anyone else when the current monopoly player is so far up it's own arse. Mobile platforms are the future, and they're not all going to be running a Microsoft OS - Microsoft knows this, and it's just a shame Adobe didn't see it coming years ago.

This is just the start of the (latest) balkanization effort by Microsoft. Shame on Nokia for not realising they are be used. It's back to the bad old days of "this site best viewed with <insert proprietary product here>". And shame on any developer who creates publicly accessible apps using Silverlight (or Flash for that matter).

Why can supposedly smart people not see through Microsoft's game? Silverlight is proof positive that their recent posturing on 'interoperability' is a total pack of lies.

The 'not invented here' and 'we must own all your bases' attitude combined with Microsoft's vast wealth is the greatest danger to a free internet.

Paris, because she's a whole lot smarter than the developer who proposes a Silverlight development to their PHB...

I usually have most apps including Flash disabled when I am surfing. I really don't want to wait around while someone's artistic mega file downloads. Nor do I want to risk the security aspects of malware in scripts. Fortunately, Silverlight disables itself.

My only experience of Silverlight was when someone asked me to look at a demo site to help him decide whether he should advise his client to use it for their new site. As all I got was a download link to the M$ site and that was nothing more than a screen telling me how to download an app (no link for Mac at that time) you can imagine what my response was.

I really don't like software whose main purpose in life is to boost the PR of the developer's web page and adds nothing to the site using it.

As for putting so much onto a mobile phone - its a phone isn't it? Who wants a brick in their pocket?