Nokia has added widget support S60 in a step towards bringing Web 2.0 to mobile phones. S60 is now the first mobile platform to support standards based widgets.
Widgets have been popular on the Internet for a while now and allow users to personalise content into lightweight applications that allow them to keep up to date with their favourite news feeds.
“Mobility will change the Internet as people are able to access and create information specific to place, time and context,” said Tero Ojanpera, Chief Technology Officer, Nokia. “Widgets are an important milestone in this development. Introducing widget support for S60, much of the innovation seen on the Internet today is being brought to the mobile space for the benefit of the millions of S60 mobile device users”.
The world’s leading smartphone software, S60 on Symbian OS, will be complemented with Web Run-Time, a Web application development environment, enabling the development of widgets and integrated Web applications for mobile devices with familiar standards-based Web technologies, such as Ajax, JavaScript, CSS and HTML.
Web Run-Time is powered by the same feature rich, open-source environment used by the Web Browser for S60, the world’s first full HTML browser bringing a desktop-like browsing experience to millions of S60 mobile devices.
Web Run-Time offers numerous possibilities for Web application development. As the Web Run-Time is built with standard Web technologies, developers can create new innovative widgets and also migrate existing widgets from the desktop to S60 with minimal effort. In the future, widgets will benefit from connecting both to Web 2.0 services, Web content and to the core applications and capabilities of S60, such as phonebook, calendar and GPS.
