Mippin's Buzz widgets for N97 homescreen
Published by Rafe Blandford at 16:11 UTC, July 4th 2009
Mippin has released four news 'Buzz' widgets, optimised for the Nokia N97's homescreen, each covering a different area: general news, tech, gaming and gossip. On the N97's homescreen, the widgets scroll through the latest news headlines, with the full story (in full screen mode) just a touch away. The widgets also feature an offline mode and customisable refresh time and content areas.
Mippin Buzz Widgets as seen on N97 homescreen, full screen and settings view.
A significant advantage of the Mippin Buzz widgets are that they have been designed with power and network constraints in mind. By default the widgets are set to update (go online) every 30 minutes. The widgets, when they update, save the text content of news stories to local disk. This means you can browse through the latest news even if you do not have a network connection.
Each widget can be customised both in terms of refresh time (from 5 minutes to 24 hours) and content area. For example, the Tech Buzz widget lets you choose from Tech News, Mobile News, Gadgets, Gaming, Tech Video and Symbian categories, allowing you to specify the type of news you would like to see.
The content is drawn from Mippin's extensive news and story database (as used on mippin.com). You'll see news from both mainstream news organisations (BBC, Guardian etc.) as well as blogs (including All About Symbian) and online media, depending on the widget and category customisation you use. The content is reformatted for display on a mobile device (no mean feat in itself) with the original story linked to at the bottom of every news item.
I've been using the News Buzz (set to UK news) and Tech Buzz (set to Symbian news) for the last week. It's great seeing breaking news stories automatically appear on the home screen of the N97. This 'living' element shows off one the greatest strengths of the N97's homscreen; its ability to provide dynamic information at a glance. Mippin have done a great job showing what can be done and, while others will follow in their footsteps, they will have a significant first mover advantage.
While the N97 does ship with a couple of similar widgets (AP News and Bloomberg), the Mippin widgets are more customisable and thus better aligned with my specific content interests. They also draw from a far wider range of content sources, which gives a more diverse feel to the news. The downside of this is that you do tend to see some stories repeated by multiple sources.
The offline support has obvious advantages if you're in an area with no network connection, but it also means that general usage is faster because there's no waiting time for a full story to load.
The widgets also work on the Nokia 5800 and 5530, albeit without the homescreen functionality.
Download
The widgets can be downloaded, for free, from the Ovi Store (New Buzz currently, the others in the next few days), or by using the links below.
Futher reading
Mipping blog post on the Buzz Widgets
Categories: Software
Platforms: S60 5th Edition
News Discussion
I see you using roadsinc on your home screen. Do you have problem with that?
It always crashed when i open email, so I uninstalled.
Are you using the latest firmware?
Lengky
Screen is readable for me, bear in mind that screenshots often look different to the real thing in terms of visibility etc.
Normally we'd have 3 or 4 by now.
So does this phone really suck, and you're just being polite?
And no the phone doesn't suck, although it is a different beast to previous Nseries so its taking a bit longer to get my head around it (compared to the N86 which I was able to review quite quickly). Part of it is also knowing where to start (but mainly it's down to me procrastinating and having a lot of other things on my plate).
Although the fact that I was happy to pass the N97 on so quickly to another AAS teamster (Tzer2 and then Ewan for August) should tell the smartphone connoisseur something. The N97 has got lots of good points but the keyboard, quality of video recording and speakers were all big annoyances to me,
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Originally Posted by Rafe
That's down to me I'm afraid. I should have written something by now, but have been occupied elsewhere. You can expect some additional N97 content very soon.
And no the phone doesn't suck, although it is a different beast to previous Nseries so its taking a bit longer to get my head around it (compared to the N86 which I was able to review quite quickly). Part of it is also knowing where to start (but mainly it's down to me procrastinating and having a lot of other things on my plate). |
But after a couple of weeks with, I'm only just beginning to get comfortable with it. I don't think that's down to the phone having faults, it's probably got to do with that the phone has so much to offer at times I don't think it's that easy to decide what to do with it next!
Bit of a waffly response....
I will say the N97 isn't the uber device that some people were expecting, and it does have a bit of a jack of all trades master of none feel, but that doesn't mean its a bad device.
With review I ike to give a well rounded opinion and I'll certainly try and include some responses to some of the widely voiced issues / good things / bad things. For example I've found the keyboard decent (not oustanding sure, but not even close to putting me off).
| I should have written something by now, but have been occupied elsewhere. |
To be fair having used one myself, I can see why a Symbian site would want to write about something else. Anything else.
Just tell Nokia you're washing your hair.