While it has been around for some time, Nitobi’s contribution of PhoneGap to the Symbian Foundation is another small piece of the jigsaw for connected developers. PhoneGap is a framework that allows developers to work in HTML and Javascript, but still talk to the more advanced hardware in a modern smartphone. The PhoneGap API’s will now be available as part of the extensions to the Symbian Web Browser.

As well as the access that the web runtime (WRT) already allows, PhoneGap supports geolocation, accelerometer, camera, vibration, contacts, SMS, sounds, orientation change, storage and network availability.

Launched in April 2009 at the O’Reilly Web Expo LaunchPad competition, the open source solution has racked up 200,000 downloads, and should make applications that span multiple devices easier to code. While it’s not a magic wand that lets your apps work on every smartphone out the box, it will reduce the time to port and test code.

More at the Symbian Foundation and PhoneGap.