Nokia And S60 Make The Web Personal With Widgets

Espoo, Finland - Nokia introduces widget support for S60 and takes a significant step in realizing its vision of transforming mobility and the Internet with rich Web 2.0 experiences. S60 will be the first mobile software platform that enables the creation of widgets using familiar standards-based Web technologies. Available to all S60 licensees, widget support enhances the Internet experience on a mobile by bringing a personal Web experience to a personal device.

Widgets allow people to personalize Internet content into lightweight Web applications and stay current with the things that matter to them. While widgets have been available on PCs for some time, they bring particular advantages to mobile devices, as mobiles are highly personal and among the few items that we always carry with us.

“Mobility will change the Internet as people are able to access and create information specific to place, time and context,” said Tero Ojanperä, Chief Technology Officer, Nokia. “Widgets are an important milestone in this development. Introducing widget support for S60, much of the innovation seen on the Internet today is being brought to the mobile space for the benefit of the millions of S60 mobile device users”.

The world’s leading smartphone software, S60 on Symbian OS, will be complemented with Web Run-Time, a Web application development environment, enabling the development of widgets and integrated Web applications for mobile devices with familiar standards-based Web technologies, such as Ajax, JavaScript, CSS and HTML.

Web Run-Time is powered by the same feature rich, open-source environment used by the Web Browser for S60, the world’s first full HTML browser bringing a desktop-like browsing experience to millions of S60 mobile devices.

Web Run-Time offers numerous possibilities for Web application development. As the Web Run-Time is built with standard Web technologies, developers can create new innovative widgets and also migrate existing widgets from the desktop to S60 with minimal effort. In the future, widgets will benefit from connecting both to Web 2.0 services, Web content and to the core applications and capabilities of S60, such as phonebook, calendar and GPS.

Web Run-Time and widget support will be available to S60 licensees as part of the S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2. Tools, documentation and a software developer kit for widget development will be made available via Forum Nokia during the third quarter 2007. Widgets will be distributed to users through several channels, one of which is WidSets, a popular consumer Internet service, which allows users to personalize their mobile Internet experience.