The digital media world has been abuzz with "widgets" for the last few years and that buzz spilled over to mobile when Nokia launched their WidSets application for mobile devices last November. WidSets is primarily a mobile RSS reader with a cool GUI interface, though it does enable users to access other web content in a mobile-friendly form. I had been using WidSets on and off since March of this year when I met with some of the Nokia folks working on the project. I was able to run it on my Sprint Sanyo 8300 and my Verizon BlackBerry 7250. It worked fairly well but was pretty slow. One of its strengths is the ability to manage all your content on their website and have it sync back to your device.
The main strength is that as a free Java application it was compatible with so many phones. As a result in the first year of existence WidSets registered an astounding 3 million users on 300 different handset models. The service officially came out of beta a few weeks ago but one of the unfortunate side effects is that the new release is no longer compatible with BlackBerry devices. According to a customer support representative they hope to publish an updated version that restores BlackBerry support soon. I look forward to getting up and running on my Verizon BlackBerry 8830 and comparing to the Viigo RSS reader I'm using.
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