A week of widgets in the news
Rating: Nokia actually explains what a widget is
This week was very definitely widget week with announcements from both Nokia and three mobile operators who formed the Joint Innovation Lab (JIL). (See separate story).
The Nokia announcement was useful because it did at least explain why a widget would be useful in the first place. What Nokia was saying is that incorporating widgets into its Series 60 (s6) platform will be made easier. It’s basically added support for Open C++. The most telling phrase is that the move should make it easier to port widgets to S60 which were previously aimed at Linux based devices.
So what can you do with a widget? Here’s Nokia, “A weather widget can now access the user’s current location via the built-in GPS and display the latest weather forecasts for that location. The flight tracker widget fetches the user’s itinerary from the airline’s web site; saves it to the mobile device’s calendar; and sets a reminder. A few hours prior to the travel time, the widget automatically checks for the flight status by getting the flight details from the calendar.”
That’s a bit complex but actually quite useful. You won’t have noticed but I also avoided quoting that terrible phrase ‘mash up’ which presently I find meaningless.
Anyway, these widgets will have a wider audience than you might expect. Did you know that so far 150 million S60 based devices have been shipped – representing 75 different models and not all of them made by Nokia either?
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