Wow. Those widgets are useless.

wow - so all those Nokia programmers that *should* have been rewriting the E71 messaging software were wasting their time with this?

Yes the widgets thus far do seem to be a bit underwhelming. Of course that doesn't make the technology rubbish in itself...

In principal I’m all for widgets…it’s one place where the iPhone was killing it. Sometime you DO just want to access certain information with one button click…but even these widgets don’t offer that.

Just now I tried to get the latest weather report…I first tried the Yahoo! Go app I installed but never use…then I remembered why I don’t use it. From the moment I clicked the icon to the time I saw weather was 1 minute 32 seconds…in that time I had to agree to let the app access a data stream, THEN tell it which one to use even though there was only one available. I had to tell it twice!

So now I have a point of reference I tried the WeatherBug widget…again, I hoped I would press the button on the icon and I would get the info…I STILL have to select the access point…there’s no way of setting a default. Then it didn’t give me ANY info at all…the background loaded, but the placeholders where the numbers should be stayed as dashes. Not helpful at all. It took 30 seconds to get to that anticlimactic spot.

Then I just hit the edit button on the N95 (the little pencil) which now loads a Google search bar, typed in weather and it brought up a 5 day forecast for my local area…15 seconds! If the Widgets and apps can’t offer anything over the built in browser (I know the widgets USE the browser but obviously bad code breaks the whole relationship) then why bother?

Not only that, but the way the phone is locked down and you can't set default access for all programs and have trusted programs not ask permission every time is just plain annoying.

Well, Nokia's strategy with this widget / widset / whatever thing seemed to me to be as thus: Let us spare the poor programmers the pain to learn the o-so-hard and o-so-complicated native Symbian C++ programming and give them easy Web technology to work with instead.

That will surely lead to a flood of new and good S60 software!

And that, now, is the result so far? As another poster already said it well: Wow.

Yes, that's not a vote against the technology itself, but the best technology is worth nothing if nobody puts it to good use. And anyway, that stuff does not seem to make *new* things possible, technologically seen. I program that Sudoku and currency converter in plain old boring C++ any day. So where's the point?

"S60 Widgets verus Widsets" should be "versus"

Thanks, corrected.

you should check my Babylon translator widget at http://www.barakharel.com/?p=7



which supports these languages:

(en) English
(he) Hebrew
(ar) Arabic
(zhs) Chinese(S)
(zht) Chinese(T)
(nl) Dutch
(fi) Finnish
(fr) French
(de) German
(el) Greek
(hu) Hungarian
(it) Italian
(ja) Japanese
(ko) Korean
(no) Norwegian
(pl) Polish
(pt) Portuguese
(ru) Russian
(es) Spanish
(sv) Swedish
(tr) Turkish

Not particularly inspiring set of widgets .I installed widsets , and soon realised that there's nothing in there of any practical use. Widsets is one of those programs that you get so freakin tired of because its so slow ( Like Nokia Headlines/channels ) . There are faster native apps available on the S60 platform. I

I hoped it would spark some slick looking Iphone-like webapps, but this is really quite disappointing. I haven't given up, but they should get some good web sites involved in this.