Foursquare sitting pretty on Symbian

Client launches, major updates, check-in milestones, and database outages: that's a serious startup

In mid-September, Foursquare started rolling version 2.0 of its location software for iPhone. The update ushered in smarter integration of to-dos and tips and a new way to remember locations encountered on the Web, an ‘Add to My foursquare’ button which functions like Instapaper for real world locations.

A week later, BlackBerry users got a faster and more efficient version of Foursquare (1.95), which also came packaged with the most requested feature: native push notifications. Two days after the BlackBerry update came news of Foursquare 2.0 for Android.

The mobile update train isn’t stopping this week, as Foursquare announced Monday the launch of a new client for Symbian. It should work on any 3.2, 5.0, or ^3 based Nokia smartphones.

The popular social location software now has a home on five prominent mobile operating systems: iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, Palm, and now Symbian.

Actually, Foursquare launched on Symbian two full weeks ago, but, for whatever reason, the company didn’t announce it. Now that some time has passed, though, Foursquare can boast of owning a spot in the top 30 applications in the Ovi Store.

On top of the most fundamental features to Foursquare in other clients, the Symbian version includes a home screen widget which displays friends’ recent check-ins. In spite of that, this will probably have some ways to go before reaching the full extent of capabilities seen on the iPhone, which might even have real-time updated streams on the way.

Add to everything above the recent 200 check-in milestone reached by Foursquare, along with a couple hours-long outages, and that’s what I call just a couple weeks in the life of no ordinary startup.