Personalized Web Widgets

Web widgets help you make the best use of your time, take care of those little but important practicalities, and keep you up to date. One click brings up a simple application personalized to your needs.

What do widgets offer? Here are a few examples of what can become real thanks to widgets:

Want to know when your flight is leaving?
Your airline widgets update your flight details directly to your mobile’s calendar, alerts you in case your flight is delayed, and allows you to check-in using your mobile with one click.

Visiting a city that is new to you?
Find your favorite coffee chain outlets no matter where you are. With one click, your device shows your location, the nearest coffee shop and how to get there.

Always forget to take the pills and get refills?
Your pharmacist sends a widget to your mobile when you pick up your prescription medication. Your mobile then reminds you when you need to take the pills, and makes it easy for you to order a refill or for a new appointment with your doctor.

Want to hear your music playlist and share it with friends?
With one click, you hear a playlist of all the music you have stored in your phone. If you want, you can upload your playlist to the Internet, so that your friends and others can check out what you are listening to.

Widgets on your Nokia mobile will use the services on your mobile – GPS location, calendar, contact list – and combine this information with Internet services to deliver a personalized and context aware Web experience. There are many uses and opportunities for widgets and you can expect to see over the next couple of years a rapid expansion in the use and availability of widgets.

The new Nokia 5800 XpressMusic is the first device to support personalized web widgets. Other devices, such as the announced Nokia N79, Nokia N96, Nokia E71 and other S60-based devices, support web widgets based on the S60 Web Runtime.

Widgets are powered by Nokia’s Web runtime. Web runtime is based on standard Web technologies including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Ajax. Nokia’s implementation uses components from the WebKit (LINK http://webkit.org/) open source project.

Web runtime enables developers and Web communities to extend their existing Internet content and Web 2.0 services to the mobile. Today, Web runtime is an integral component of Nokia’s S60 smartphone software platform. S60 enables developers to build widgets using its Web runtime application development framework allowing developers to access device services including contacts, calendar, GPS, and multimedia. To find out more about developing widgets on S60 visit Forum Nokia.

To download and try Web widgets see WidSets for S60 mobiles – WidSets has over a 1,000 S60 Web widgets to choose from.
You can also read more about and see Web widget demos on S60 .