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:
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.
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
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
Ronen Halevy ( View Profile) - Posts: