Nokia’s Symbian S60 is a pretty old platform, and the newest fifth release didn’t do much to improve the overall situation. What you might not know is that over 40% of all smartphone users’ worldwide use a Nokia smartphone running this operating system! Just imagine, that’s tens of millions of users. Developers know that, that’s why they still develop and maintain applications for this OS, and that’s a good thing, because otherwise, Nokia would lose a lot of customers.

Even though Nokia is finally moving towards the much more improved Symbian S^3, it will be quite a while before all S60 users switch to newer phones and the new OS takes its rightful place as the successor. If you own an S60 phone, you’ll definitely want to know what apps are there available for it, and you’ll be surprised to know that there are quite a lot of them, actually. Here are just some of the best Symbian S60 apps you can download at the moment.

Fring. Fring is a great app for any phone. It allows you to make cheap or even free calls and send messages using a wide variety of VoIP and IM services, including Skype, AIM, Yahoo, Google Talk and others. Using a Wifi connection, now you can have free calls to anyone in the world. Even a call over 3G VoIP is cheaper than what networks usually charge.

JoikuSpot Light. This is a pretty useful app for those who have a laptop and want to use their Wifi-enabled S60 phone as a wireless hotspot. With JoikuSpot, you can do just that, route the Internet through your 3G data plan and have the Internet on the big screen wherever you are in the world.

Y-Browser. Y-Browser is the best file explorer for Symbian S60, and given that it’s totally free, I doubt you’ll ever find anything better. Using it, you can easily browser for files, view and edit them and transfer them between folders and even to other devices.

QuickOffice. QuickOffice is the best mobile office tool for Symbian S60 phones. It has support for most of the most popular file formats, including docx, xls, pdf and rtf, and you can easily edit and view any of these documents on the go, wherever you are. It’s pretty expensive, but it’s a must have if you’re likely to edit documents on the go.

CorePlayer. CorePlayer  is the best video player for Symbian S60 and Windows Mobile. It has integrated codecs that take advantage of any hardware acceleration on a phone, so the playback is smooth most of the times, and you don’t need to convert files to a lower resolution on your computer beforehand. The current version is quite old, but it works fine on even the newest S60 phones.

S60 is still a very popular OS, but just like Windows Mobile 6, it is hopelessly outdated. Nokia will continue to support users of this operating system, but not for very long. Either way, many developers have already ceased support for their S60 apps. The good news is that they’re pretty stable, and that isn’t going anywhere, so if you need some good apps for your phone, just do a search on Google – you’ll find hundreds of them.