In case you missed it during the hectic time between Christmas and New Year, Nokia have announced a competition to design a widget for the N97, specifically for the homescreen. The winning widget will 'go into production' (which we assume means it will be coded by the Nokia development team) and the winning designer will receive a production N97 with their widget ahead of the public release of the device. More details on the Nseries website.

The Widget system is now firmly entrenched in Nokia's product portfolio, and sits alongside languages such as C++ and Java. Based primarily around XML and scripting, widgets are growing in popularity, with the BBC iPlayer being a notable user of the technology on S60 handsets.

The competition makes a lot of sense for Nokia. By asking people just to sketch out a widget in any convenient computer art package, anyone, not just designers, can get involved. This should widen the scope of the competition and the number of people who can enter. I'm sure everyone has wished “why can't there be a button that does this...” on their phone. So now you can tell Nokia.

If this does take off, then not only are Nokia benefiting from a word of mouth campaign that says the N97 can do many things on the homescreen, but it also gets a lot of information back on what 'power users' think the widgets are capable of. Many of the ideas will feed back to the developers, some to marketing, and others into those looking at how to pitch this to the networks as a device that customers want.

Smart move all round.

The Nseries Competition website.