Nokia today announced the release of WidSets, a mobile widget platform available for Java MIDP 2.0 phones, including of course non-Nokia phones. Put short, WidSets is for the mobile what Netvibes is for the browser.
I’ve played around with WidSets for an hour on both my SonyEricsson K750i as well as a more recent – and higher resolution – Nokia N80, and I must say that I am impressed. Even at the 176 x 220 pixels on the K750i navigation is a charm.
WidSets already has an impressive number of widgets available for use (mostly all based on RSS feeds) and creating new based on the RSS template is easy. More advanced widgets can be created using the already available WidSets SDK, seemingly borrowing a lot of the (good) ideas from Opera Platform.
The release of WidSets has the potential to stand out as the starting point for a debate on the standardization of widgets, and I’d be surprised if it’s not picked up on soon by W3C or an independent ad-hoc standards body. Already today we have the abovementioned Netvibes, Mac OSX Dashboard, Opera Platform, and more recently even Chumby and now WidSets.
The counterpoint could obviously be that the pipe is enough of a standard, giving further traction to RSS and the arguments Ray Ozzie put forward at this spring’s Etech.