S60 Software for Widgets

Web for your Mobile
Your mobile gadgets are becoming too friendly with the Web. And this friendship is creating a slew of new services for you, for your convenience. For instance, take smartphone software platform S60, which is built on the Symbian mobile operating system. Licensed by leading mobile phone manufacturers including LG Electronics, Lenovo, Nokia, and Samsung, S60 has extended its capabilities for developing personal and context-aware widgets. This was announced Wednesday by Nokia.

Widgets are small, Web standards-based applications that can access S60 services, such as calendar, contacts, GPS, messaging, audio, and video. These widgets can also mash-up information from the Internet together with selected information from the user’s mobile device.

With this development, Web developers will be able to create more useful services for mobile consumers. A weather widget, for example, will allow people to access the user’s current location via the built-in GPS and instantly display the latest weather forecasts for that location. The flight tracker widget will fetch the user’s itinerary from the airline’s Web site, save it to the mobile device’s calendar, and will set a reminder. A few hours prior to the travel time, the widget will automatically check for the flight status by getting the flight details from the calendar. Sounds interesting.

According to Nokia, over 150 million S60 devices (with 75 device models) have cumulatively been shipped by all S60 licensees.

Now, My Techbox asks:
How will mobile operators persuade consumers to use such Web-phone hybrid services, as most consumers continue to use mobile phones for voice communication only?