Nokia has announced its first Open C Challenge, a global contest for S60 mobile application development on Symbian OS smartphones. 

The scheme aims to encourage open source and freeware developers to use the Open C environment to create mobile applications for S60 smartphone users worldwide.

The event is sponsored by the Forum Nokia global developer program in conjunction with Orange and the Symbian Developer Network. 

"Nokia's global invitation to millions of developers to take the Open C Challenge taps the exponential growth in open source and Symbian developers currently working on new applications for smartphone devices," said Lee Epting, vice president of Forum Nokia.

The Open C Challenge will enable developers to apply their desktop and open source development skills using Nokia's Open C POSIX environment, which is built on Symbian's PIPS technology (PIPS is POSIX on Symbian), to create and port mobile applications for next-generation devices based on the smartphone platform.

The challenge will provide contestants with web-based seminars, training sessions and peer-to-peer discussion boards to help their migration from desktop to mobile application development and in porting open-source applications to Symbian OS using the Open C SDK plug-in.

The finalists will be invited to present their applications to a select panel of industry judges at the Symbian Smartphone Show in London on 16 and 17 October. The winners will be announced on 17 October.

Contest winners will receive:

• Cash prizes totalling more than $20,000
• An invitation to distribute their application via the Orange Application Shop direct to Orange customers
• Fast track premium membership in the Orange Partner programme for finalists
• Free Symbian Signing for their winning application
• A free year's membership in the Forum Nokia PRO developer programme
• Additional Nokia marketing and business support

The competition is open for registration to software application developers worldwide beginning from 9 July 2007 at 9am EST at the Forum Nokia website.

Contestants are encouraged to enter more then one category, and winning applications will be selected based on the judging criteria of Innovation, Quality, Usability, Creativity and Degree of Middleware Difficulty.

Up to five applications may be submitted by contestants for consideration in two application development categories: porting existing open source assets to Open C; and Native Symbian C++ development in Open C.