Why can’t we have widgets on our standby screen?

Stefan Constantinescu

Stefan Constantinescu (@WhatTheBit on Twitter) has loved technology since as far back as he can remember. It started with computers, but in the past few years his passion has turned to mobile devices. As a mobile phone enthusiast who lives and breathes devices that connect to the internet, he knows he is not alone with this radical fascination of all things wireless. He is strongly opinionated and enjoys a good debate so leave comments in his posts and he’ll get back to you! Stefan began blogging as a hobby in the fall of 2006 and joined IntoMobile in the summer of 2007. Later he got a job at Nokia in March 2008, but as of June 2009 he has rejoined the IntoMobile team. He is currently based out of Helsinki, Finland.

• Farhan

  First you have a great blog going about Nokia and u r on my regular read list , now coming to screen widgets , i just discovered a program called Fusion which changes the active screen into widgets , right now i am downloading it , will post my experiences later

• designfreak

  agree totally, it sucks when i think of how stupid those designers in nokia didnt give a single thought to make good use of the screen we see most often! (one more thing, why cant they allow Nseries user to edit Ouickoffice files?!! look at windows mobile..wtf?!!!)

• Jarek

  It’s possible to create Flash Lite wallpaper with connection to external data source… But only for devices which has wallpaper support (not E61)

• Jeb

  I agree but only to a point. I see where your coming from talking about waisted space, but it’s not waisted if you have a busy schedule with lots of calendar entries. You also have the option to have one of your email addresses inbox displayed. I do agree with you I would love to have the weather or CNN or BBC news on my phone but if you have a busy schedule that won’t happen. Though we should have the options.

• Viipottaja

  “when i think of how stupid those designers in nokia didnt give a single thought to make good use of the screen we see most often!”

  Well, the whole idea of the new standby screen with the row of favorites on top was to make better use of the screen we see most often. So they have given it some thought. Why they did not include possilibility to include widgets, I don’t know. If you do have new messages, calender entries etc. the screen does get pretty full though. One also needs to keep in mind that the product cycle of every new version of S60 probably at least a year, probably more. Widgets are a relatively new thing, and might appear in a next revision?

  The reason editing of office docs on Nseries is not an “out of the box” feature is called product differentiation. That’s for E series phones. Again, we may not like, but that appears to be the logic. Smart or not, I don’t know. I don’t know much, do I?

• geek

  It’s pretty full for me. But I use the built-in email client (works great with gmail), calendar, and to-do notes.

• geek

  Oh yeah, it also has music information when I use the podcasting app.

• viocccc

  Farhan: i wouldn’t call Nokia’s engineers and UI designers stupid. I do find it impressive that they managed to craft powerful smartphones that remain so easy to use that many people use them as normal phone without any trouble and without even knowing that they’re using smartphone. This says a lot about the thought that has gone into UI design. Even my mother has no trouble using her 5500 i got her for christmas even though she hasn’t yet managed to really understand how to use a mouse. Keep in mind that S60 is targeted not only at geeks and power users but at the mainstream market as well. This is why S60 phones are so popular and are by far the most used smartphone platform in the world.

  Regarding editing Office documents, take your own advice and have a look at Windows Mobile devices. You’ll see that a lot of them do not allow Office editing either. In the case of N-series devices, i believe that this is perfectly normal. N-series devices are consumer devices targeted at those who want to make phone calls, takes pictures, listen to music, that kind of stuff. Only a tiny minority of them would ever want to edit an Office document on their phones. Adding this feature in all N-series devices would not make financial sense. Those who really need that can skip a few coffees a buy a full third party office suite that will do the job. Or get an E-series device whith a full keyboard which will be much more suited for the task.

  As for the standby screen, i also agree that there definitely is room for third party plugins in there. Nokia should release the standby screen API to developers. I’m pretty sure that this will come some day. Why they haven’t done that already, i don’t know. One of the reason I can think of is that opening the standby screen to third party plugins (or widgets or gadgets or whatever you want to call them) poses a major reliability problem. The standby screen is the key part of any S60 smartphone. It must not crash. This simply isn’t an option. If the standby screen crashes because of a poorly written third party plugin, you’re in big trouble. You can of course restart your phone but it will crash again since the plugin will still be there. You might end up with an unsusable phone. There are of course ways to circumvent the problem and it might be that the “stupid” Nokia engineers are already at work on this. Wait and see.

• Gil

  Mine is (almost) always full with both calendar events and the mail inbox.

• Stefan Constantinescu

  You guys have my email, why not send me screenshots?

  I want to see how you fill yours up. I got my E61 during the end of my school semester so there wasn’t a lot of data to fit input in it to be honest.

  And one more thing: don’t insult the Nokia’s designers intelligence. you can insult the work they produce and offer constructive criticism, but don’t call them stupid or dumb. that goes for any company really.

  respect

• designfreak

  thanks..me bad, terrible and stupid..
  will give more constructive criticism and respect next time..

  btw, what’s the application you guys put on the precious 6 slots at the standby screen..

  here’s mine:

  1. new text message
  2. messaging
  3. file manager
  4. gallery
  5. gotalkmobile
  6. bluetooth

• Nick Jones

  AFAIK the API for the Standby Screen will be released in the post-FP1 SDK.