MySpace expands smartphone support, embraces Symbian

Social network MySpace is now battling back against Facebook by adding more smartphone support to its mobile site, including new applications for both the Palm Pre and Symbian OS-based Nokia S60 phones.

Beyond the newly added Palm and Symbian, the MySpace mobile site already supports the iPhone, BlackBerry, Sidekick, and Google Android mobile platforms.

At Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona this week, MySpace has also announced plans for a redesigned mobile site with a user interface better geared to larger smartphone screen sizes 176 pixels wide and up.

"We want our users to be able to access MySpace from any device," contended John Faith, VP and general manager of MySpace Mobile.

Meanwhile, MySpace will try to expand the mobile site's global geographic base by offering support for 13 different languages.

On a related note, MySpace is also joining the nonprofit Symbian Foundation, a Nokia-spearheaded effort to equip Symbian -- an OS traditionally more popular in Europe than the US -- with a converged environment folding three disparate user interface layers -- UIQ, NTT DoCoMo's MOAP, and Nokia's own S60 -- into a single common framework.

MySpace sees its role in the Foundation as helping to build a "socially relevant context" for Symbian developers, according to officials.

Meanwhile, MySpace competitor Facebook is also paying considerable attention to the mobile Web. At the Palm Pre launch event at CES in January, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg told reporters at the show in Las Vegas that 20.8 million people use Facebook from mobile platforms. There, Sandberg also claimed that the mobile users are on average "50 per cent more active" than the general Facebook population, which numbers over 150 million.