Nokia today announced an agreement with Microsoft to make Silverlight available on Symbian S60 devices as well as on Nokia Series 40 phones and Internet tablets.

"Silverlight is Microsoft's answer to Adobe Flash, and enables the kind of integrated rich media the Web 2.0 crowd are used to," The Register's Bill Ray explains. "Getting Silverlight onto S60 is a significant step for Microsoft."

"Microsoft is coming from behind," InformationWeek's J. Nicholas Hoover notes. "Adobe has had a strong mobile presence for Flash for years. It has distribution agreements with 18 of the top 20 device manufacturers worldwide including Nokia, and according to Adobe, 450 million devices have been shipped so far with Flash Lite, which is a trimmed down version of Flash. That, of course, compares to zero for Microsoft."

"Microsoft is expected to demonstrate Silverlight on S60 during its opening keyote at the MIX08 conference in March," writes TechRadar's Audley Jarvis. "Microsoft Silverlight availability for Nokia Series 40 devices and Nokia Internet tablets will be confirmed later in the year."

More here from CNET News ... more here from Gizmodo ... more here from BetaNews ... more here from TMCnet ... more here from dBTechno ... more here from TechNewsWorld ... more here from Computerworld ... more here from VNUnet ... more here from BBC News ... more here from Techtree ... and the press release is here.