Symbian Foundation announced a collaboration with Nitobi on Monday that will simplify mobile application development. Nitobi’s PhoneGap will be included in the Symbian^3 web extensions package. This means any web developer who knows HTML, CSS and JavaScript can now write a mobile application once and deploy it on Symbian, as well as iPhone/iTouch, iPad, Google Android, Palm, and Blackberry.

PhoneGap is an open source development framework for building cross-platform mobile apps. Developers can build apps in HTML and JavaScript and still take advantage of core features such as telephony, contacts, camera, accelerometers, orientation and location that can be modified or enhanced to improve the end user experience and device functionality. Here’s a video showing examples of iPhone apps created with PhoneGap.

“This is a great partnership that will benefit app developers across the globe. For the thousands of apps that have been built using PhoneGap, developers now have the option of developing one app which will run across all platforms, including Symbian,” said Lee Williams, Executive Director of Symbian.

The Nokia N8 will be the first Symbian^3 device from Nokia that will benefit from this collaboration. It is expected in the third quarter of 2010.

You can read the full press release here.