Today, Layar is very excited to announce that after much development and testing, the Layar Reality Browser is now available on the Symbian platform. This has been a long-awaited and highly anticipated release for Layar, but today we are proud to introduce a truly terrific augmented reality experience for Symbian devices.

Owners of S60 and Symbian^3 devices with GPS, front-facing camera, compass and accelerometer (see list of supported devices below) can now rediscover the world around them using Layar’s augmented reality browser.

“Augmented reality is changing the way people view the world,” said Raimo Van Der Klein, CEO and co-founder of Layar. “Layar’s goal is to bring the AR experience into people’s every day lives and with this offering we are able to provide Nokia users with that rich digital experience on their mobile phones.”

We are proud to help bring augmented reality to masses, and with Nokia and Symbian - which remain juggernauts in the mobile industry with millions of users and devices in the market - we are significantly closer to that goal.

Layar for Symbian is available now for download in the Ovi Store, and is compatible with these devices:

• Symbian^3 - Nokia N8, Nokia C7, Nokia C6-01, Nokia E7


• S60 - Nokia N97, Nokia N97-mini

As a former Nokia executive turned consultant and speaker, Tomi Ahonen has bolstered his reputation in the mobile industry by authoring six bestselling hardcover books and three eBooks. His latest book, The Insider’s Guide to Mobile, is a free eBook which details “the customers, services, apps, phones and business of the newest trillion dollar industry.”

The book marks Tomi’s tenth publication, and to celebrate the anniversary he asked Layar CEO Raimo van der Klein to author the book’s foreword. In it, Raimo details his own history in the mobile industry, including his time with Nokia and KPN, as well as his formation of Mobile Monday Amsterdam with fellow Layar co-founders Maarten and Claire.

Additionally, he explains his vision of where the mobile industry lies today.

“Basically now we have entered the third wave of mobile. First was Communication, second was Content and now the third is Context. We are barely scratching the surface of this third wave,” he writes. “The exciting stuff is happening in the middle, between the organized data in the cloud and the actual ‘dumb’ sensor information. In the complete history of content we have never been confronted with creating sensor based dynamic services that fit the context of a user. […] I consider this phase in mobile to be the phase where we will see the true face of this medium.”

You can read the entirety of Raimo’s foreword over on Tomi’s blog, Communities Dominate Brands, and to download Tomi’s free eBook, The Insider’s Guide to Mobile, head on over to the book’s page on Lulu.