Widsets
There’s was post by Anina on the new Forum Nokia blogs about WidSets.com. This is a venture within the business incubation part of Nokia, Nokia Ventures Organization. Strangely, the post was removed from the blogs but is still on the RSS feed as I write this.
Anyway, WidSets uses a Java ME client to read existing or user-created RSS feeds or web services. It’s free, innovative and viral because it encourages sharing and publishing of widgets. It’s a great example of the kind of thing that could take hold outside the operator portals.
WidSets is also a public example of how hard it is to support a large variety of JAVA ME devices. Here are some quotes from the website and forums…
- You’ll need access to the Internet and a mobile phone with support for Java MIDP 2.0, Java MIDP 2.0, 128×128 color screen or higher.
- WidSets does not currently work with Nextel, T-Mobile USA or BREW-enabled phones (e.g. Verizon, Alltel, U.S. Cellular), or Palm devices.
- I have Nokia N91 and when I downloaded the client it didn’t recognize it.
- We are working on this to be able to better take into account the large screen phones.
Motorola M1000 (Japanese version of the A1000) seems to have the screen cut off at the top (no menus appear) - There are currently some phone models under which WidSets doesn’t really work because of these types of keymapping issues.
- For low end phones: Avoid using widgets that have image content, because presenting images simply requires more memory.
- As several other users, i’ve tried to launch it from my mobile (6630) without any success
- when trying to install widsets on my blackberry it fails (’901 Insufficient Memory’)
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I installed the Widsets J2me application fine on my Sharp V-902SH. When I run app it is very,very slow to respond to keystrokes and when I go online nothing appears just the starry sky background. Is it a memory problem perhaps?
There’s lots more of this kind of thing on the forums.
I am not trying to criticise WidSets here. Instead, I am just just observing how hard it is to support a large number of phone types. Also, to be fair to WidSets the service is still in beta. Some problems have already been solved and others are being worked on. These problems are not unusual - they are expected. It impractical to test on all phones, all firmware versions and on all networks. Hopefully WidSets already know that getting the application to work on a large number of different devices will entail significantly more development than went into the first version of the application.
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