Goozeberry: For the Mobile Future 2.0

Widsets (I pronounce it widzits) has an amazing mobile app that is one of the first that really make mobile widgets a reality – and the way they have done it, is so clever. Think of it as a widget framework for mobile phones.

Widgets are the playground toys of all users Mac – and those smart enough to have Opera as one of their browsers, and more recently – those bold enough to have made the move to Vista. Now – your phone can join the list.

Widgets are displayed to your phone in a small Java app (its about 150k) – that you can download from their WAP site which has great handset recognition, so its a mindless installation process.

There are the usual suspects when it comes to widgets – clocks, BBC News, Sudoku, Wikipedia, Digg, engadget, flickr, technorati, et al. So in addition to plain RSS-reader type widgets, some have simple functionality (games, chatting, email, etc).

One of the most exciting aspects is the Widsets Studio which gives anyone (and I mean anyone) the ability to create widgets from existing RSS feeds. But wait, there’s more. There is a early release SDK for developers – and created Widsets can be uploaded into the Library.

The site uses AJAX nicely in the handset search, login and the drag-and-drop functionality in the widget Library (widget selection section). The website integrates extremely well with the on-phone app. So widgets selections make on the website will appear on the phone by clicking on the Synchronize button.

Handset compatibility is fair – Samsung’s D500, D600, D820 and D900 are all supported. Nokia’s E & N Series phones are included as well as some of the older models – like the 6680, 9300, & 9500.

Their approach to handsets compat is novel. It seems that they do it on a user experience basis – so they basically just say ‘Try it out’. They then determine the compatibility based on the levels of success rates from the UAProf. This is also cross referenced to the user location (country) and they give an indication of other users that have had success with the same phone/country location.

I find that its the first on-phone app that I use regularly – to check news, mobile email (until I get my JASJAR), play Sudoku, etc.

When you log in, it connects and updates each of the widgets – including your email and GMail accounts. Widgets with new content have a small green rosetta showing that they have been updated.

Watch the creativity explode in the next couple of months. (All this, and its still in Beta).

So – get cracking! Try it out. Create a Widset for your blog. Create one for a blog you follow. Play with it. Anything.

Technorati Tags: widsets, widgets, samsung, nokia, mobile, web2.0, web20, web2, RSS,

Powered by ScribeFire.