You will remember my recent feature looking at the way users have set up their Symbian homescreens? Some very interesting ideas were shown off and it got me thinking. You see, I also tinker with Android smartphones and wondered how much of the best bits of the Android notifications and Google Now could be represented on Symbian? I hit quite a few roadblocks, in truth, though I'm still happy with the ultra simple 'info/now' set up I ended up with.

Some of the things I wanted to try and mimic from Android included:

1. the weather forecast for the next few days
2. upcoming appointments
3. new emails waiting to be read
4. new social direct messages waiting to be read
5. latest stock changes for popular stocks of my choice
6. events coming near me that I might not be aware of
7. information on my 'journey home' from wherever I am

I had no issues with the first three, and these form the homescreen I ended up with, shown on the right (widgets are 'Weather, forecast', 'Calendar, next event' and 'Mail'). The last four turned out to be problematic and I'd welcome input if anyone else can suggest an app or technique:

There are a few applications which push social updates to the Symbian homescreen - Gravity has a very plain, bare bones offering showing just a few characters of the last three tweets in your timeline but, unless I'm missing something, there's no way to get its widget to show mentions, let alone DMs. Ditto Facebook widgets like that of 'facinate'. 

• I even tried Nokia Social's widgets, but again these cover only the basic timeline/newsfeed and not the tweets/updates I was really interested in, those that might have a degree of urgency or timeliness. Am I missing something? Surely there's a way to put up @mentions or DMs, for example, on a Symbian homescreen?
• Stocks are also a problem, there are several stocks and shares applications (e.g. here), but I couldn't find one with a homescreen widget. Any ideas?
• Location-specific events also turned out to be hard. There's a 'My location' widget as part of Nokia Maps, but this (literally) only reports on where you are and lets you save it as a favourite. Surely there's a gap in the market here? Anyone know of an events guide which can present info on a Symbian homescreen?
• The 'time to home' is something of a Google Now speciality and there's always a shortcut to Nokia Drive and then tap on 'Drive home', etc. So perhaps this one will never make it to a homescreen here.

Note that the homescreen shown on the right, which I think of as my 'Now' screen, isn't my main homescreen. Instead, I have it off to the side, i.e. one swipe away (similar to how Google Now/notifications might work), with my main homescreen full of app and contact shortcuts,  plus some toggle widgets. (Ignore the other two homescreens hinted by the bar at the bottom of the screen, they're just for playing with while researching this short piece!)

Opening things up to the AAS community then, any suggestions for my questions and frustrations above? Cheers!