What’s a Widget? Is it like a thing-a-me-bob?

widg·et (wjt)

n.

1. A small mechanical device or control; a gadget.

2. An unnamed or hypothetical manufactured article.

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[Perhaps alteration of gadget.]

When I posted about Access’s new addition to the Netfront family I didn’t think I’d be brought to my knees by a widget. We are all familiar with widgets with our desktop browsers, but the addition of dedicated widgets to a Windows Mobile browser seemed like a novelty. Well it’s not a novelty, and it’s not even funny. The base application installs on it’s own then you add widgets, like modules, to the base application. You can add weather, news, world time, whatever widgets are available now.

I’m anything but derogatory about the NetFront Browser, in fact I use it quite a lot. So the Idea of NetFront Widgets excited me, until I installed them and tried to use them. One of the most noticeable things is the widgets have an always on top attribute. 

As you can see from the screen shot, when you run the widget app it over rides your home screen. Not a good look in my opinion, I would like it to get involved in the today screen, not take it over. Maybe the idea is for people to develop apps/widgets, to let you do away with the  current UI customisation programs you are using? At the moment the widgets don’t integrate with the current WinMo interface on my device.

There is a really nice option in the setting to Dock or Float the widgets, which means you can drag and drop them where you want, although you can’t resize the widgets, other than maximum and minimum.

One of the things I found really confusing is that you have to configure each widget, as well as the widget base, I had many errors with some of the widgets

and I could not remedy that error.

All in all I couldn’t get the configuration to work well, and I really got frustrated with the app, or should I say apps.

Albeit a Beta application, it seems to have lot’s of quirks, and it’s not often I’d say that an app is well, undercooked. As a concept, this is great, in reality, it’s not working at the moment, and I assume that’s why it’s a Beta.

At the moment can’t say I’d use the widgets, Access say they have optimised the foot print of the app and I didn’t find that, in fact I’d say it uses a lot of RAM and doesn’t deliver the goods.

Configuration is confusing and seems, disjointed, the base app configuration seems to be the most important thing, and finding the config for the individual widgets seems elusive, if it is non existent, but I was stumped.

To conclude, it’s a great concept, to have all of your today screen must haves available as widgets. So you just have the widget launcher on your today screen. I can conceptually imagine how that would work, and can visualise it, but as it stands, this doesn’t lend it self to mainstream usability.

Try it out if you want to, I’m about to uninstall the app, and wait for updates on it.

Have a look at the widget site and see if you want to try it out!