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BlackBerry Bold Widgets – Can’t We Call A Spade A Spade?

by Ronen Halevy on Sep 9th, 2008 at 8:30 am EST
4 Comments »
 

When Mark sent in this tip I had to read it twice. It turns out that RIM is planning on taking homescreen application installation icons and rebranding them as widgets. They even have a knowledge base article describing the 3 that will be released. The three are: weather push service, stocks powered by Reuters, and WorldMate Live. To me these just sound like homescreen icons. I wonder why RIM is starting to call them widgets? They even have a knowledge base article describing how to remedy a situation where these widgets don’t appear due to BES restrictions.

Here is RIM’s description of their widgets from the knowledge base article:

weatherwidget Weather Setup

  • Weather information pushed hourly to the BlackBerry smartphone
  • 40 high resolution, compelling graphics
  • Weather report visibility when hovering over the application icon
  • Detailed long-range forecast
  • User-selected weather content provider
  • Global availability

Note: Depending on Profile settings, push notifications may generate audible alerts or vibrations on the BlackBerry smartphone.

stockwidget Stocks

  • Powered by Reuters®
  • Provides information from popular indexes such as Dow Jones®, NASDAQ® and S&P 500®
  • Representation from United States, United Kingdom and India exchanges
  • Stock information searchable by company name and/or stock symbol
  • Last stock quote search retained in the My Recent Quotes section
  • Some of the information available includes:
    • Latest trading price
    • Percentage gain/decline
    • Latest news about the company
    • Day’s range

worldmatewidget WorldMate Live

  • View up to five different time zones at a glance
  • Store travel itineraries including flight, rental car, hotel, and meeting information
  • Weather, map and currency conversion information provided for destinations
  • World map feature
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This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 9th, 2008 and is filed under 9000 Bold, News.
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4 Comments to “BlackBerry Bold Widgets – Can’t We Call A Spade A Spade?”

  1. Posted by: DavidB
    September 9, 2008 at 11:07 am EST

    Is this new/different somehow than how for example WeatherEye works?

  2. Posted by: Ronen Halevy
    September 9, 2008 at 11:25 am EST

    I dont think so but maybe… Its just the first I have heard of these Widgets.

  3. Posted by: Bla1ze
    September 9, 2008 at 12:33 pm EST

    Their is nothing new or great about them, they are just browser links that lead to the mobile.blackberry.com, where you can sign up/download the same old crap that has been there for the past year…they push them out as service books so the only way to get rid of them is to hide the icons cause as soon as ya delete the service books and pull battery or power cycle they come back…useless and pointless for me as I have no interest in any of them.

  4. Posted by: Shoestring
    September 10, 2008 at 10:52 am EST

    The knowledge base article link returns an error right now, so I haven’t had a chance to read the whole thing. Based on the phrasing of the excerpt, it sounds like the icon changes based on information retrieved (asynchronously) from a server.

    I’ve never seen such a thing on my Curve — does the current OS (4.2 or 4.5) offer that kind of functionality?