Support for the Nokia Series 60 platform will be included in mobile application development tools from Borland and Metrowerks. Nokia claims the new developer tools, expected to be available before the end of the year, will enhance the Series 60's position as a platform for multi-media mobile services.

Borland and Metrowerks said their tools, announced at the Nokia Mobile Internet Conference, November 5th and 6th, are designed to increase the speed, efficiency and quality with which developers can create applications for the color screen Symbian OS-based Series 60, which Nokia, Siemens, Samsung and Matsushita already support.

A sister product to Borland's JBuilder MobileSet, the Borland Series 60 C++ Toolkit was jointly developed with Nokia. It enables the reuse of existing Symbian application source code or the creation of new Series 60 applications and testing and debugging of applications within a Series 60 emulator.

According to Metrowerks, its CodeWarrior Development Tools for Symbian OS, Professional Edition is a complete, integrated development environment that enables developers to develop, debug and compile C/C++ Symbian applications for Series 60 and other Symbian user interface packages. The toolkit offers remote debugging with a MetroTRK (Target Resident Kernel) feature, as well as a completely integrated Symbian target build environment.

Nokia said the Series 60 platform supports open and common key technologies, such as MMS, Java, WAP/XHTML, and C++ / Symbian OS (native). It features a color display, and all key telephony and personal information applications, including browsers and messaging clients. The user interface is designed one-handed operation.