Future of Widsets?

[paulkeogh]

Is Widsets still part of Nokia's future widget strategy ?

Recently Vodafone announced the Widget Manager initiative on S60 devices and compared their open, W3C compliant Opera based platform against Widsets. One of the quotes was;

“[Widsets] is a Java platform, so it’s not open. Widget Manager is built on Opera, so it’s faster and easier to write for. It uses open standards.”

Announcement is here;

http://www.electricpig.co.uk/2008/12...get-avalanche/

Any comment from Nokia ?

[Nokia Ron]

WidSets technology will be profiled to bring Internet content and services to S40 devices, untill a time when WRT widgets can run on S40 devices. WRT technology is in the core of Nokia widget strategy, today in S60 and later on other platforms

Ron

[j-engineering]

Nokia Widsets project appears to be dead now, a great product being born in wrong place and wrong time. Probably its main problem is that it is based on java technology, a cross-platform framework able to cover majority of mobile phones, not just Nokia ones. But it will be never adopted by any other vendor except Nokia, probably it should be driven by some standalone entity, not just Nokia. This base is not enough for the project, and reality shows it.

If being deployed only on Nokia devices, it could be some "builtin" firmware feature, not necessary in java, better native, like Widsets WRT module. Modern approaches are browser-centric, so probably Widsets should be developed as an extension of browser framework, not as a standalone product. But Nokia has other products/teams on this market, so it would be kind of competition, on a market where Nokia is not able to create enough revenue flow so far, especially in this tought time.

Anyway, Widsets is a great product, I was impressed a lot, and I'd like to thank the whole team who brought it to the world. At least we were able to see it and enjoy. It definitively set a new level of products in j2me world, and teached many people what can be archived here. Such a pitty it probably won't ever go opensource.