idgetsWay

Patrick April 17th, 2007

It started with desktop widgets. More recently, web widgets have taken center stage. Now, signficant attention is begin focused on mobile widgets.

On the heels of last month’s launch of Zenzui–a Microsoft IP Ventures company–Nokia upped the ante in mobile widgets through its S60 platform for Symbian-based mobile devices. Nokia will offer a widget software development kit (SDK), allowing developers to create custom widgets to run on the S60 platform. The widgets will are purported to be based on web standards, and will supposedly make it easy to transition desktop widgets to the S60 mobile platform. The SDK will be available in Q3 2007.

The announcement about mobile widget support on S60 includes a note that widgets for S60 will be distributed through various channels, including WidSets, the mobile widget gallery site. To date, the widgets on WidSets appear to be custom-developed by the WidSets team, the content owners, or both. WidSets provides its own SDK for developers, who can create XML-based widgets for existing web services, or create entirely new widgets through its proprietary language it says is optimized for mobile devices. This apparently marks the first time that WidSets is getting into the distribution of widgets from another source (albeit one from Nokia Ventures Organization).

The mobile widget landscape is starting to shape up nicely. Here is a quick primer:

• BluePulse: widgets promoted as a part of the BluePulse social networking service for mobile devices.
• Mobidgets: The “>as-yet-released mobile widget offering of Mobease and WebWag (whose main product competes in the webtop space).
• MoJax: An AJAX-based widget application framework, this one from mFoundry, a diversified mobile development company.
• OpenWave: Another AJAX widget software development kit called OpenWave Mobile Widgets, with support for Windows Mobile, Symbian, BREW and other platforms.
• Opera: Still more AJAX widgets, these for Opera Platform, also based on web standards with the ability to easily transition web content to mobile devices that are supported by Opera.
• WidSets: Custom mobile widgets for a variety of mobile devices, plus distribution of Symbian S60 widgets.
• Zenzui: Custom, proprietary “tiles” using Zenzui’s zooming interface for accessing Internet content.

Many of these providers promote their AJAX-based platforms and ease of developing with web standards, each is a proprietary solution in its own right. Content owners must choose between platforms, or be prepared to support many. I’ll delve more deeply into further segmenting the mobtop widget category in a future post.

Technorati Tags: widgets, gadgets, tiles, WidSets, Zenzui, Mobidgets, MoJax, OpenWave, BluePulse

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