It was an interesting evening with a pretty good line up but surprisingly samey, with all sorts of people putting forward their overlapping solutions for mobile widgets. All, perhaps unsurprisingly, were convinced and convincing that mobile widgets were the future - at least to some degree.
David from Vodafone research gave a good introduction to the topic and talked through their hope that there would be a great deal of opportunity in this area by enabling the masses to generate their own bespoke and more personal content.
Qualcomm talked about their platform for building mobile applications; trigbuilder - a trig is a complete application and triglets are something smaller that goes OTA. Then a dutchman from Frog design talked about a widget app called Celltop they built on Brew and uiOne for US carrier alltel. Quite a nice looking approach, it used a universal horizontal scrolling mechanism but a rather bespoke widget world.
Nokia were represented by the S60 team boasting a 100 million devices and the leading smartphone platform across more than just nokia handsets. They were very proud of their new widgetplatform which extends the browser capability to widgets and other apps. Basically they have templates for expanding and contracting, auto scrolling and the like and apparently make it possible for content owners to generate 'standard' widgets in days.
Disappointingly up until now there had only been the same 2 examples for all, and the same we had years ago; sport (football) and weather. Thankfully Chaarls (the standards guy) from Opera came next and managed to drag us away from that a little with his focus on cross platform/cross device rather than solely mobile and a timesheet monitor widget that really might just work even for those of us with chronic ADD..
The rest were demos which I'll come back to but this is late enough, and tonight was a better story!
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