Subscribe to Optaros RSS feedDr. Dobb's Journal recently ran a brief interview with Craig Cumberland, director of technology and application marketing at Nokia: "Mobile Widgets and the Internet Experience."
In it, he offers the best explanation I've seen so far of why widgets are so important in the mobile internet space in particular. Although the industry has been talking about the impending mobile Internet for several years, and widgets have gotten lots of attention in the last couple of years, the arrival of widgets on mobile looks especially promising for specific usage scenarios.
As Cumberland puts it:
. . . in a desktop environment, resources such as network bandwidth, processing power and memory are not constrained in any way. So opening 5, 10, even 20 browser instances, tabs, windows...and slipping between them all to access and interact with a variety of content is the norm. And so widgets on desktops don't present a significant improvement in the content experience with the Internet.
However, widgets, as directed content experiences, have an immense benefit for mobile users because they allow people to personalize Internet content and interaction into lightweight web applications and stay current and active with the Internet content that matters to them.
As platforms for creating and distributing widgets get more standardized, we should expect to see an increase of highly tailored, domain-specific applications deployed as mobile widgets, which don't attempt to replicate all the functionality of a standard web application but keep users connected to just what they are interested in.