Nokia's S60 Widgets were launched at CTIA 2007 but until recently it was hard to find many actual Widgets to install. That's not a problem anymore as Nokia has created a Widget Library on the mobile web with over 1000 Widgets to choose from.
"Widget" is such confusingly generic name. The word is just so overloaded with different meanings. There are desktop widgets and browser widgets for PCs, J2ME based mobile widgets, GUI Widgets in various development tools and probably a few other kinds of Widgets I've haven't heard of.
Nokia's S60 Widgets are something else, a relatively new type of mobile Widgets, which for lack of a better term, I'll call "mobile AJAX Widgets". They look like standalone applications and are launched from icons in the S60 Launcher just like native and Java applications. The ability to be run simply by clicking an icon is what distinguishes AJAX mobile Widgets differ from Java ME based widget platforms like Plusmo, WebWag and Nokia's own Widsets. Each Widget is a small package of code created using the same technologies as web pages; HTML, JavaScript and CSS. In order for Widgets to work, the Nokia Web Runtime must be available in the phone's firmware. Currently that means an N95, N82, N96, 5320 Xpress Music, 6210 Navigator, 6220 Classic or E90. For some of these phones specific firmware versions versions are required too.
If you have a compatible handset, head over to Widgets Library at widsets.mobi/library The library's home screen (top image) has a carousel-like display of five featured widgets at the top and a list of categories containing the rest of the Widgets. Each category has it's own featured Widgets too. I installed quite a few of the widgets and my advice is to stick with the featured Widgets, at least at first as they really are the best. My favorite is the MOSH Widget (2nd image). MOSH is Nokia's mobile social content sharing site and the widget is an easy to use catalog of the most downloaded audio, image, video and game files on MOSH along with a search engine that makes it easy to find any game, application and video on the MOSH mobile site. The MOSH widget is what Nokia Download should be, a comprehensive catalog of mobile content. Nokia doesn't promote MOSH very much, I suspect some of their carrier customers are pretty upset about it because it's an end run around their download portals. I can't imagine commercial game publishers are too happy either as there is a lot of pirated commercial content particularly in the Game category. That doesn't really bother me but I'm surprised that Nokia doesn't do a better job of policing uploaded content for the sake of their corporate image. But MOSH works and has just about everything you could possibly want for your phone, so if I'm looking for a game or application MOSH is the first place I go. It's the closest thing Nokia has to to the iPhone App store and it's all free. This Widget makes MOSH even easier to use.
The WeatherBug Widget (bottom) is also nice, so nice that I've
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posted by Dennis Bournique
August 7, 2008 @ 8:39 pm
7 View Comments
