Purists, look away now, because this is going off at a slight unofficial tangent. Almost two weeks ago we had a batch of five new homescreen widgets deployed through SW Update to Belle Feature Pack 2-powered phones - very useful additions and I did note at the time that there seemed to be no technical reason why the same widgets couldn't be installed on the older Symbian^3/Anna/Belle/Belle Refresh generation devices (N8, E7, etc.) Indeed, the SIS files had been intercepted by one enterprising soul already and installed on an E7 with success. I've waited a fortnight and these still haven't been 'pushed' to the older phones officially - which is why I thought you might like a walkthrough of grabbing and installing them unofficially. If you haven't already done so, of course!

NB. The SIS files here - browserwidget.sisx and homescreenwidgets.sisx are sourced from dailymobile.se, also worth a visit for their forums.

Here's a walkthrough, then:

Bluetoothing the two SIS files over to my Nokia E7 - of course, you could always download them directly from this page via Web etc.; (right) once grabbed, tap on each to install in turn. Note that, after tapping, the 'homescreen' package takes a good minute before anything happens - don't panic! Leave it and installation will start in due course...

...Told you! The widgets install to your C: system disk, of course; (right) the Webview widget will need a restart of your phone, since it works at a slightly lower level, but you should see the other four widgets shown above immediately as available on your homescreens. The screenshot above right is taken after a restart.

You'll remember the Webview widget from its release for FP2 phones, of course. The idea is to present a live view of any part of any web site - so the first time you add an instance of this to a homescreen, you'll be taken to a web browser instance and asked to browse to the site you want. Don't worry, you'll get the hang of it. And yes, you can have more than one Webview widget, even on the same homescreen.

This should work on the N8, E7, C7, C6-01 and X7. I then wondered - what would happen on the Nokia E6, with its landscape VGA screen? I knew that widgets usually had to be resized for the E6, but was keen to experiment for the sake of AAS readers:

Experimenting on the E6. Err.....

Perhaps unsurprisingly,  things didn't go quite as smoothly on the E6. Webview didn't appear at all - but then this depends on pixel-mapping to a web site and the pixel resolution is different on the E6, so.... The other four widgets installed OK but you can see that the Contacts Communication widget appears at the wrong size - though still works, albeit in miniature. Likewise, the Mirror widget works, but its label is too small and in the wrong place. Happily, the Flashlight and Stopwatch widgets are fine.

Of course, with Sod's law no doubt applying here, now that I've put this small feature up, the chances are that Nokia and Accenture will push the new widgets officially to these devices fairly soon. I'd be very surprised if the versions/builds were different though, at least for the main nHD devices. The E6 is a special case and I'd be surprised if the manpower could be spared to do versions specially for this.

Comments welcome - any glitches with these widgets on your Belle Refresh device?