It's all over the internet - silverlight will be on on nokia's s60 and s40 devices. you're probably asking yourself why on earth everyone is so damn excited? well it's probably hard to understand for someone who didn't develop mobile internet.
development for mobile internet can be very , very frustrating.
as a .Net programmer you have wonderful tools , powerful libraries to accomplish amazing results , but but the front end of your apps - the pages are simply disappointing because of weak in functionality browsers. small displays , funny problems with right-to-left languages that take like 30% of your development time , this is the reality for us , mobile web developers.
nokia's s60 and s40 devices are basically all 3d generation and most 2nd generation devices! they hold like half of all devices in use in these categories in the world. they are your favorite N95 and E65 and 6280 and many many others.
Visually appealing sites is something pretty much non-realistic when your biggest concern is to make pages look alike (not even the same) across tens of browsers. and what about flash? well , it's not very much in use in mobile web. what you have here is FlashLight a very "light" (see "weak") version of flash. and besides flash is for designers , this is what we are used to think of flash - maximum visuality , minimum functionality, though it doesn't have to be that way, but design and functionality just don't connect when it comes to flash. mobile devices don't even support ordinary swf files.
so when they say that nokia will support silverlight on almost all normal phones , well , i loose my breath. this means that in close future i will be able to build a site and show it proudly to my mom and dad and they will say : "WOW!" instead of usual :"what can you do here?".
silverlight has a significant advantage over flash and this is the programming part. all .Net is at my command , it can be very powerful behind the curtains (code behind) which will deliver amazing functionality along with flash-like visual beauty. pages won't seem so static as they are now. microsoft provides tools for a better cooperation of designers and programmers for silverlight. i can continue working with visual studio!
i hope it is just a matter of time, and hopefully not too much time, that other companies like sony ericsson and samsung will also adopt silverlight for their 3G phones.