Mippin Homescreen widgets rollout for Nokia N97, Nokia 5800, Nokia 5530

If you'd read our last post about Mippin Widgets Going Crazy you'd know we've been working on bringing content on to the idle / home screens of mobile devices running the Android operating system from Google. The first Widget we developed was called the Tech Buzz Widget and it’s gone on to become a popular download among the Android Market community. Its success prompted us to pay more attention to the emerging area of home screen content and services on phones, with a deeper look at how the Android operating system can improve user experience, product design and choice for mobile internet users. In addition we were also keen to identify which other operating systems might be similarly capable of powering a Buzz Widget.

So today we’re pleased to make two new announcements: firstly that a new range of Buzz Widgets is now available for Android handsets, which means potentially up to 19 new handsets by the end of the year, all capable of running four or more Buzz Widgets simultaneously. Secondly, we are also pleased to announce the launch of Buzz Widgets for the Nokia platform.

Launching on Nokia as well as Android is a significant step. It is partly a testament to Nokia that their latest operating systems are sophisticated enough to run a Mippin Buzz Widget, but also because Mippin is once again fulfilling its goal to connect mobile internet users with the content they’re interested in. With mobile consumers increasingly keen on a simpler mobile user experience, there’s more and more interest by developers like us in the phone’s home & idle screen real estate. As users access more of their content and services via this area of the phone’s UI, the development of a selection of home screen capable widgets gives our Android and Nokia users a huge range of content choice, while importantly the cross platform availability of Buzz Widgets reflects the trends in mobile consumer behaviour. As consumers choose different ways to interact with their favourite web content on their mobile, Mippin is in a great place to distribute publisher’s content in a format optimized for the content, the user’s phone and now the user’s needs.

Features

Four Buzz Widgets will be live from today on all Android phones and also on the Nokia N97. These are:

• News Buzz Widget - the very latest up-to-date news

• Gossip Buzz Widget - the latest celebrity news

• Gaming Buzz Widget - the latest gaming news

• Tech Buzz Widget - the latest technology news

Each Buzz Widget gives you a choice of different categories

• The News Buzz Widget enables users can select different categories of news, from All News, UK, USA or World News.

• The Gossip Buzz Widget brings you the top stories from the world of Entertainment, Fashion & Beauty, Gossip, TV & Film, Music & Bollywood.

• The Gaming Buzz Widget gives you Nintendo, Playstation, XBox, Gadgets, Tech News or a mix of all categories.

• With the Tech Buzz Widget, you’ll get Tech News, Mobile News, Gadgets, Gaming, Tech Video plus Android or Symbian depending on your handset.

All widgets allows users to select their choice of refresh rate, so if you can't live without knowing what's going on in your favourite category, you can get the latest stories automatically on your phone every 5 minutes, 24/7!

The picture below shows all four widgets on a Nokia N97.

Customisation

Once downloaded, the widget enables easy customisation with the settings button, to choose your preferred type of content and refresh rate. Then as the stories are downloaded and updated to both Android and Nokia devices, the home screen displays each story headline as it happens - if you then click on the headline it opens the full story, including pictures and video capability. Once a story has been opened, you can either read the whole story by scrolling your finger up or down the story window, or you can browse other stories using the navigation buttons located at the bottom of the story.

Hopefully you'll find it a doddle to use. Other things we should also mention are battery consumption and content downloading. We've been very wary about battery consumption because these widgets are highly addictive. To prevent high battery consumption by default the widget only goes online every 30 mins to get the latest content and it keeps this content in memory and then saves the stories' text to disk. Because the text is saved to disk, you can use the app even when you don't have a network connection, which means it's the perfect solution when you can't get online or if you're on a fast moving train, or even faster moving plane (even if the phone has been switched to flight mode!)

Where to get them

To download all the widgets, head over to the Android Market if you’ve got an Android / Google phone, or if you’re the lucky owner of a N97 (or also a Nokia 5800 / 5530 if you’re prepared to forego the home screen support – home screen functionality not supported on that device) then go to Nokia Ovi Store for the News Buzz Widget. The News Buzz Widget is currently the only Buzz Widget that’s live on Nokia Ovi Store but you can download all of them from these links until they’re all officially live.

That's it for now. As you can tell we're buzzing too :) so time instead for you to try them out! Please let us know what you think in comments on this blog or via info@mippin.com

Downloads for Nokia N97, 5800 / 5530

• Download News Buzz widget

• Download Gossip Buzz widget

• Download Gaming Buzz widget

• Download Tech Buzz widget