S60 Open to new features

I am a tech lover who hates messing about with the innards of tech. If I buy a phone with a browser and email, all I want to do is press a cute little icon that says "Browser" or "Email" respectively. If absolutely necessary, it can then prompt me for a password. Any arcane questions like, "what is your SMTP pop pqrst server setting...blah...bhah..." gets me fantasizing about pulling out the finger nails of whoever made such a nasty and unintuitive application.

Some might call it sacrilege. I don't think so. I love cars but would never raise the hood to get grease under my fingernails. For me, the pleasure is in the driving, the thrill of taking the corner hard, feeling the vibrations in your spine, enjoying the responsiveness of the chassis. For all this to happen, all I need to know about how a car works is, - where to put the key, or on a Honda S2000, how to push the starter button. In other words, being an enthusiastic driver and an enthusiastic mechanic are two different things. You can be passionate about either one or both. My hands are clean and I intend to keep them that way.

This brings my nicely to the subject of widgets, which are basically a tiny self-contained applications that typically runs in an environment called the widget dashboard. A widget dashboard is able to handle multiple applications at the same time. For those you who use a Mac know exactly what I am talking about, for those who don't, check www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard or http://widgets.yahoo.com. Or better still, get a Mac.

With its light application environment and low resource needs, widgets are perfect for the mobile world. And the good news is that now you can get them for your phone and it's developed by a Nokia Venture called “Widsets” (www.widsets.com). The solution consists of two parts, a webpage where you log in (with your PC) and search, make and subscribe (free) to widgets. And a client application that can pushed to your phone from the website.

To get started you need to visit www.widsets.com and get yourself an account. Once in, you have to choose from an every increasing choice of widgets. All you need to do is the "pick" a widget, and it gets added to your "MySet". Once you have selected all the widgets you want on the blue space (Screenshot 2), a simple click on "Mobilize Set" send link via sms to your phone. Click on the link and enjoy the show.

As the screenshot 1 above shows, what you get for your trouble is a nice beautiful spatial environment with nice icons each of which does what it says. E.g. the BBC news icon gives me news, the Flickr icon, lets me get specialized feeds from Flickr and Engadget allows me draw up my Xmas Wish List. And if the present set of widgets does not contain any kind of application or news service you want, you have a great (easy to use...believe me) tool that allows you to make a new widget. I was able create a Motor sport news widget in about 2 minutes that gave me RSS feeds from the BBC website.

The application works in background and uses pretty small amount of data to update applications. You can also check your data download rates using the "System Widget" that comes pre-installed.

Drive on!