Nokia renamed Series 60 S60 today, giving the most-used smartphone interface in the world a fresh start. The Finnish phone giant even launched a new Website to go with the name change.

The S60 platform runs on top of the Symbian operating system, itself used on the majority of smartphones in most markets on planet earth—except North America.

Series 60 (S60) is licensed by Lenovo, LG Electronics, Panasonic, Samsung, Siemens and Nokia, of course. There are currently more than 25 Series 60 devices on the market, with Nokia moving 25 million units alone (as of last May).

And, according to market research firm Canalys, the interface accounted for 60 percent of all converged device sales during the second quarter of 2005, way ahead of the Palm, Windows Mobile, RIM BlackBerry, Linux and other types of advanced handset platforms.

Nokia views extensibility to be at the core of the interface's success.

The company's director of software platforms marketing Mauri Metsäranta says, "Developer innovation, licensee and operator differentiation can be added to the S60. People can choose from a wide variety of add-on applications, enhancements, services and content, and really benefit from the extensibility of their S60 device. This is the true value of the S60 that we want our customers to recognize with the redefined identity."

S60 Web Browsing
To coincide with the change in moniker, Nokia released a new Web browser for S60 3rd edition, the latest version of the platform, today.

The browser is based on WebCore and JavaScriptCore components of Apple's Safari Web Kit, an open source Web rendering engine for mobile devices that Apple uses in its popular Safari Internet browser. It is the result of a deal announced last June.

Based on KHTML and KJS from KDE's Konqueror open source project, Nokia says this software has enabled it to achieve major improvements in Website usability on smartphones, through the re-use of a proven desktop rendering engine that has been developed and optimized by a large open source community over many years.

The plans is for its open source codebase and extensible architecture to enable third-parties, such as S60 licensees and the open source community, to develop new features for the browser as well.

Philip Schiller, an Apple's senior VP, asserts, "Safari Web Kit's blazing performance, efficient code base and support for open standards make it an ideal open source technology for projects like the new Web browser for S60. We're delighted that Nokia can take advantage of Apple innovation and our commitment to open source development to bring a new Web experience to S60 smartphones."

Browser features include:

Preservation of original page layout

Easier navigation through page miniatures, reducing the amount of scrolling

Pop-up blocking, enhanced start page, and simplified menus;

Visual History with a back function showing miniature views of previous pages

Text Search, which works as you type, taking you directly to the interesting part of the page

Web Feeds, providing easy access to RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds from Websites, blogs and news stories

Dynamic HTML, supporting dynamic menus, rollovers and scripted behavior such as AJAX applications;

Extensive support of industry standards including W3C's HTML, XHTML 1.0, DOM, CSS and SVG-Tiny; other Web standards such as SSL and ECMAScript; and Netscape style plug-ins including Flash Lite and audio.