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Symbian sees (Silver) light at the end of the tunnel

Spotted in the wild, but gone in a flash

A Symbian version of Microsoft's answer to Flash, Silverlight, has been spotted in the wild. It quickly disappeared but the hope is that it will emerge later this week.

The download and associated documentation was spotted by Mary-Jo Foley, who managed to snag a copy before it disappeared and is expecting to see the product launched later this week at Microsoft's Mix Web developer conference.

"The installable executable file enables users to run Silverlight applications on the Nokia S60 5th Edition platform."

Which seems pretty clear, but just to underline the point, the download was accompanied by an emulator, sample applications and developer documentation.

Microsoft and Nokia announced that Silverlight would be coming to Symbian almost exactly two years ago. We've prodded them a few times since then, only to be told that work was progressing. To be honest we'd pretty much given up on the idea of Silverlight making the move onto Symbian, but it seems now that it's on its way.

Quite why it's taken so long is open to debate, but perhaps it can be attributed to Microsoft's favoured create-software-and-then-wait-until-the-hardware-is-fast-enough approach.

Nor can we tell how fully-featured Silverlight for mobile will be, unless we can catch Microsoft uploading early again. ®

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