I ran out of ideas for this month’s Soft Approach review. My brain refused to crank up, probably due to the Hari Raya break.

 

Just when I was all worried with the due date looming, my editor sent me an email requesting for a special review focusing on widgets! Yes! Give me a title and the rest would be easy or so I thought until I came to my senses. What is a widget, by the way? How can I review something I know nothing about? So, I’m back to square one, Googling it.

I learnt that widgets are small applications able to do simple tasks well and effectively. They are not new; previously these cool applications were also known as plugins or extensions. Widgets are available for PCs and Macs and of course even mobile devices too. The great things about them are that widgets are normally free.

Widsets, Bluepulse, mFoundry, Bling and Plusmo are some of the well established companies which develop mobile widgets engines and maintain a big pool of these applications. The other neat thing about widget is that users can choose and combine a few varieties fine tuned to suit personal preferences. Besides that, mobile widgets normally operate on J2ME platform so they are even usable on general handphones, not only expensive smartphones.

After fooling around with widgets for a week or two, I have come to love these tiny applications, they sure can do wonders. Since there are so many varieties on the Internet, I will only focus on some popular widgets. Do feel free to try out the rest, not only from Widsets but also Plusmo. Forumers label Plusmo’s applications as more interesting but a notch lower in terms of UI (User Interface) when compare towards Widsets. I will let you be the judge of that.

To spur up excitement, the first few widgets on the list are games. “MemoryGame” require player to find fruit pairs as fast as possible in order to get his/her name on the highscore board! Go to https://www.widsets.com/ and search for MemoryGame.

My favourite, Sudoku, is also available as widgets. There are also many other simple games. Most of them are merely puzzles which does not involve sophisticated controls and 3D rendering.

The more appropriate use of widgets is, of course, as an RSS reader. More than 80% or these applications do just that. Depending on your interest, Widsets can be set to feed in sport news from BBC Sport, weather information from Foreca Weather, news from BBC News, latest computer hardware analysis and industry news from AdnandTech, PC gaming from IGN.com, China news from Sina China, Ebay sales items, the popular digg and Readdit, Gizmodo gadget weblog, Wikipedia search engine and so on.

Besides games and RSS feeds, there are also a small number of special miniature applications. An interesting one is Password Generator. As the name implies, this program randomly generate 10 characters which can be used as passwords. No save option is available though, so user will have to remember the password by hard.

Widsets allows users to pick up any number of widgets, as long as there is enough memory on handphones and data bandwidth is sufficient. Talking about bandwidth, here is a reminder. Although widgets are free, downloading RSS feeds from the telco isn’t. So unless one is subscribed to an “eat all you can” data package, it is advisable not to use widgets excessively or you might get a heart attack by the end of the month when phone bill arrives.