Developers for the Symbian Series 60 smartphone operating system will now have more tools and support to create widgets for mobile phones. The lightweight Web applications already appear on PCs. Making them easier to develop and deploy for cell phones will spur greater phone customization and increase mobile data usage.

Nokia is offering widget support to all S60 licensees though Web Run-Time, a Web application development environment that speeds the creation of widgets and integrated Web applications for mobile devices. It uses standards-based Web technologies, such as Ajax, JavaScript, CSS and HTML. With the tools, developers can create new widgets and also migrate existing widgets from the desktop to S60 with little effort.

Widgets reach out to the Internet occasionally to collect data on things such as weather, stocks, flight schedules and more. Whenever you use the widget, it always shows the latest information. While this is great on computers, having them on cell phones makes loads of sense and is the next step in the evolution of the mobile Web experience. There is no need to fire up a Web browser, wait for it to connect, scroll through links, or perform searches to find the basic information for which you are looking. The widgets reside as small icons on your phone that are instantly accessible and have the info all ready to go.

They will make the mobile Web truly more useful.

The bad news is that the tools, which are part of S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2, won't be available to developers until the third quarter of this year. This means it will be late 2007 before we see any innovative widgets for the S60 platform. By then, the public should be somewhat more familiar with the use of mobile widgets on devices such as Apple's iPhone.