A screenshot of what’s supposed to be a Widget home page running on Maemo (an open-source Linux-based OS from Nokia) could make its way to Nokia smartphones. The homepage itself would work like a “netvibes” homepage, with user-selected widgets. The whole thing would be ad-supported, which reminds us from the ad-supported computers fiasco from a few years back.
Some believe that ads will be targeted to the location and the behavior of the user. We’ve heard that for years, but we’ll keep an open mind. Now the bad news: the rumored date for this is Q4 2010. Yikes! That’s far away. We’re not sure that widgets are the future of cellphones because they usually waste a lot of display real estate. Plus they generate tons of requests so that exacerbates the latency problems inherent to wireless networks. That said, this is one of the nicest implementation that we’ve seen.
