Mobile Innovations today announced that they have appointed as a Series 60 Competence Centre in the Series 60 Product Creation Community. Which is great news, if we knew what it was actually about. So we caught up with Matt Millar from Mobile Innovations to ask...

"Mobile Innovations is one of the hidden Symbian OS companies. While phones may have one name on them (and at the moment that normally means Nokia, when you disassemble these phones, you'll find lots of different bits of hardware and software from a lot of different companies," points out Matt. "everyone's heard of Intel Inside, but would you recognise that more than 80% of the world's phones smartphones are powered by chips from Texas Instruments?" Of course you don't, there isn't a 'TI Inside' on the box. But it's all part of the package, and this is where Mobile Innovations comes in.

"We're known in the industry, but does the end-user really care? They just want something that works, with the hardware they want (eg an MP3 player). What we dake sure that manufactures can fully integrate new applications and hardware so they are a natural part of the device. It's not just a case of adding a media player SIS file onto the CD-Rom."

But haven't the Series 60 phones been rather similar in nature? "Up to now they have yes. Look at the long lead time between Nokia's 7650 and the diversity of the range you're starting to see with them now. It's taken maybe two to three years. Companies such as Siemens, Sendo and Panasonic are in the process of finishing or marketing their first gen Series 60 phone, so I confidently expect new and exciting designs to come from them in the future. Where are all the clamshell phones? The integrated keyboards?"

"Maybe a company wants a camera with an optical zoom? We can help with that. Maybe they want a media phone, with an integrated hard disk, and iPod-esque design on the outside control panel. How do you make new things an integral part? That's where we come in. We may joke that we're like the SAS - we go in, do the coding, get out and nobody knows we were ever there - but it's a good description of how we do things."

"All our work in the past (and there has been a lot of work they\ve done, but just like the SAS they'll never confirm or deny what they did) has been under the hood, and this Symbian Expo should see us come out into the light a bit more," says Matt. "Being given the Competency Status lets everyone know just how good a job we do and coupled with some more announcements in the next week, it should prove we've got the right stuff."

Matt, thanks for talking to us.