Nokia eats Apple for open source smarts

Nokia has tapped up Apple's open source knowledge for its next generation smart phone browsing.

The new Series 60 browser, which will debut in the first half of next year, will incorporate some of the same open source technology found in Apple's Safari web browser, WebCore and JavaScriptCore, based on KHTML and KJS from the Konqueror project.

The latest iteration of the Series 60 browser will better enable developers to customise the application, as well as providing users with new browsing features. Data traffic is already becoming a key part of Nokia's growth strategy, with the phone maker hoping to see data revenues grow to 23 per cent of mobile operators' revenue by 2009.

Nokia also said it will be working with Apple on open source in the future and will be actively involved in the open source community.

Tero Ojanperä, Nokia's chief strategy officer, said: "Open source software and Linux is an interesting phenomenon - it is not new for Nokia, we have used open source software and Linux server side and we are more and more using open source in our developments."