Fri 15 Sep 2006
Some of you may already hear or use Widsets on your S60 phones to pull interesting information, such as feeds or news. For you who don’t know Widsets, I copy the definition from Widsets web site:
WidSets is a very simple and yet clever little service that brings information that you normally have access to over the Internet, directly to your cell phone. It uses mini-applications called widgets that keep an eye out on updates to websites you normally visit several times a day. This is done through RSS feeds, which push information from these websites directly to your phone, whenever they are updated.
To run Widsets on your S60 phones, you need to register an account at http://www.widsets.com/. After you get an account, you need to download the Widsets application from http://get.widsets.com/. Note that you have to use web browser on your phone to download Widsets application (don’t use PC because it is not supported).
Now you have Widsets application and account. What’s next? You need mini-applications called widgets to pull information for you. There are many widgets available at Widsets web site. Unfortunately, there are only a few useful widgets. There are some widgets that don’t work properly. Some others display too little information, thus they don’t offer additional values. Well, the application is still in beta anyway.
Here, I would like to share some useful and interesting widgets for your S60 phones. So, let’s start with 4 widgets just to give you a feeling how Widsets looks like. I may publish more interesting widgets in the future…
Weather
This widget allows you to get weather forecast for your city. You can get the weather forecast for your city from World Weather.
Flickr
This is one of my favorite widgets. You can enter tags that you want to subscribe. The widgets will monitor Flickr’s database and pull any new images that match your tags. For example, you can enter tags like “nokia, phone”.
Google News
This widget allows you to monitor news for certain topic from various news sites, including BBC, ABC, Reuters, Bloomberg and many more. As an example, you can monitor news about “Nokia” and you will see something like the following pictures.
TechCrunch
Some of you may know TechCrunch, one of the most popular technology blogs out there. Now, you can have the contents on your widgets too.
Update (21-Sep-06): Just a couple of days ago after I posted this blog, a new release of Widsets has been released. The new features are: improved web site navigation, great new widgets, rich contents from blogs and sharing articles/widgets.
Update (03-Oct-06:): Widsets has been officially released. Read their press release here. Congratulations for all Widsets team!
RSS 2.0
September 16th, 2006 at 12:32 am
I have widgets installed but I never saw any potential or real use for me in this service.
September 16th, 2006 at 12:33 am
I never found any real use or potential for me in this service. Perhaps when more functions are added later on. Looks very cool though.
September 16th, 2006 at 8:25 am
@Daniel: I fully agree with you. As I agreed in my post, not so many useful widgets at the moment. It’s still in beta phase anyway.
It has potential and there are still more rooms to be improved. I would like to see more useful and fun stuff too, e.g. stock tickers, traffic monitor, etc. (like what we have in Yahoo! Widgets or Google Home Page).
September 16th, 2006 at 9:11 pm
dear friends,i got a n93 i want to have yahoo!go software ..can any kindbody show me where i can get the software
September 25th, 2006 at 12:31 pm
I noticed a new service Go Widgets which does not require any software and has some useful widgets although some of them are not free
http://www.go-widgets.com/
September 25th, 2006 at 3:40 pm
@Abdul Aziz: Thanks for the link. It looks cool, although not so many widgets now. Hope they will add more widgets soon.