Sep 12 2007
Mobile Widgets
It’s funny how things cluster out there. Yesterday I was all rev’d up at how Where is enabling location capable widgets on handsets, and at Moto’s new MOTOMAGX WebUI capability (ship a JavaME app that has an html canvas and JS capabilities) available late this year. Today I find that Mike Rowehl has just written an article on mobile platform evolution that touches on this and references a related article by Tom Hume which calls out a mobile widget platform (very early still) called WidX. Whew.
I like what WHERE is doing, and hey, it’s shipping on Sprint and Alltel. The rub, however, is that the carriers have to approve the widgets that actually ship, and you’re one of many. They’ll pay you $5 if you cause the sale of their app (a $2.99/mos subscription for access to ALL widgets), and will do revenue share in some cases. It’s great that they have LBS capability in place, local scripting, and map resources. Wish they were standards compliant rather than doing their own markup and scripting (very close to html and js, but with exceptions). I think the economics are tough to build a business based on publishing widgets on Where, but it is a direct and easy path to a mobile presence for a web property.
WidX looks interesting. Still very early in the process, but it is web standards based. In my view it’s a (great, interesting) technology experiment until it is available on lots of phones (including the locked networks in North America).
There was a speech out of Google on Web 2.0 a couple months ago where Sergey described Web 2.0 as widgets that run wherever you are. At the time I thought this was a rather constrained view of what Web 2.0 is (and I still to), but that concept makes loads of sense, and has lots of interesting implications when you think about the Google Phone. I also think Apple did us a favor by making people think HTML/JS for developing apps for the iPhone. Would I like to see third party native iPhone apps supported by Apple? Sure. But low barrier to deployment, and easily update-able “widgets” in mobile are worth more attention than they are getting.
Thanks for the reference. I’d like WidX to be a totally standards-based platform that all phones can have to run applications as I’m not sure that the manufacturers are going to get there on their own.
The Motorola extensions are pretty cool, but again, single manufacturer and others are unlikely to accept Motorola’s lead without some other factor.
I’m still trying to figure out if the WidX project has potential – the AJAX guys tell me that all phones will have webkit in a couple of years so there’s no need.. i’m not so sure myself. things tend to take a *very* long time to filter down in mobile (you can’t just install a software patch to make your 6230 into an N95..) but hey, perhaps they’re right.
alex.
joemoby.com
Just want to point out that Webwag also have a local HTML rendering and javascript capacities in J2me (http://webwag.com/mobile ). And it’s the first Web/Mobile widget platform.
The version currently in production still using an non JavaScript language, but next one to be release before the end of the month is closer to standards.
Where is mobile only based, while at Webwag we think that mobile is just one of the component of your digital life, and it’s good to have also the web counterpart.
So give it a try : http://webwag.com
Thomas