S60 is mainly used by Nokia but has also been used by a few other manufacturers, including Lenovo, LG Electronics, Panasonic, Samsung, Sendo, and Siemens Mobile. Certain buttons are standardized, such as a menu key, a four way joystick or d-pad, left and right soft keys and a clear key. New features are only added to phones while they are being developed rather than after public release. Unlike a standard desktop platform, however, the built-in apps are rarely upgraded by the vendor beyond bug fixes. Originally, the most distinguishing feature of S60 phones was that they allowed users to install new applications after purchase.

The S60 software is a multivendor standard for smartphones that supports application development in Java MIDP, C++, Python and Adobe Flash. It is intended to power fully featured modern phones with large colour screens, which are commonly known as smartphones. S60 consists of a suite of libraries and standard applications, such as telephony, personal information manager (PIM) tools, and Helix-based multimedia players.

In 2010, S60 was replaced by the new Symbian^3. The OS platform has since seen 5 updated editions. It was created by Nokia in 2001, and was first released in 2002 with the Nokia 7650 smartphone. The S60 Platform (formerly Series 60 User Interface) is a software platform for smartphones that runs on the Symbian operating system. Symbian S60v5 (5th Edition) menu on a Nokia 5800. Symbian S60v3 (3rd Edition) menu on a Nokia N73.

S60v2 theme nokia