Native XHTML/CSS widgets for Nokia Mobiles?

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Native XHTML/CSS widgets for Nokia Mobiles?

by Avatar	Stumble this!	February 11th 2008

is the question that Ivan Pope from Snippero makes while giving us some condensed take on it from learned about it when he noticed a new Nokia Widget Platform while updating his nokia phone firmware (what nokia phone by the way ivan?).

But it is better if i quote from him:

I’ve just updated my mobile phone firmware and I find that Nokia’s widget platform is available - though it’s early days. The exciting thing here is that their Web Run-Time (WRT) allows widgets based on XHTML, CSS, Javascript and Ajax. They claim you can port existing Widgets to Web Run-Time. This should allow the addition of mobile widgets to the universal widget platform. Developers should be able to offer their widgets for the mobile platform without rebuilding them. Interesting times indeed.

The he proceeds to do the condensed report you should check out if interested.

This was of course before my own report on the new Opera Mobile 9.5 browser that will be launching for both symbian and windows mobile.

Does this make the Nokia Widget Platform irrelevant?, no, it does not. it just downplays it to specific uses where you want a widget run directly from the mobile phone desktop.

This of course would make no sense to most Windows Mobile 6 (and soon 6.1) or even those at any of the two nokia high end phone lines.

But my better guess on this is that it must have been a reaction to how the Iphone made web pages suddenly be called Applications because we were not even talking about actual widgets in most cases, but in some of them they were like in the case of the “Stocks” application been nothing but a Yahoo widget.

So i think this nokia widget platform comes from a reaction to that.

I think it can still be something good for basic phone lines where flash, ajax and silverlight will not be present in the browser offerings by Opera or Firefox and widget must be launched from the mobile desktop.

on the other hand, it will be irrelevant in the high end phones because not only Opera is releasing a browser for symbian, so does too Firefox and Skyfire. all of these browsers should be launched by mid year so i doubt the nokia widget platform is gonna out pace them in the smartphone/media phone lines.

All in all still good to see nokia is always triying to react as fast as it can to everything.

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