October 4th, 2006 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Other news | No Comments »
Nokia yesterday officially launched the Widsets.com website. Widsets are widgets for your mobile. Nokia didn’t really put their name on the service and that appears to be a wise move as they are targeting more then just Nokia handsets as they also target handsets from device manufacturers like HTC, Motorola and Samsung.
Since widget services are known for often supporting simple games, my fear directly was this service could seriously target that five minutes of fun we are all aiming at. Installing the service was easy. I filled in my mobile number and received a download link via sms push. After downloading it allowed me to easily select widgets on both PC and mobile. The PC selection was much better though as it allowed me to fine-tune much more about the widgets.
Widsets indeed supports small mobile games, but at this moment development is not open to the public which means there is only Sudoku for now. The public at this moment is only allowed to build widgets based on RSS readers. Also, there are plans to make available commercial widgets in the near future.
Of course, we couldn’t finish this article without at least releasing a widget ourselves. It’s still a bit simple and not at all where we want it to be on a design level, but here you can get our RSS reader. Along the week we will dive into the XML of the application and release a definitive version just before the weekend.
Nokia has released a lot of products in the last year to broaden the consumer’s use of the mobile phone and its many capabilities. However, initiatives like Nokia Sensor and Nokia Flier never really took off. Even at Nokia events, until now I discovered only one person using such a service. Nevertheless, the fact that this service is not Nokia branded and aimed at multiple devices might make it really interesting for consumers.
