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The widget-filled future
VisionMobile's Research Director, Andreas Constantinou, discusses the mobile widget space
What constitutes the mobile Web is constantly growing and evolving, with tools and technology driving changes in user habits and in the ways services are offered. Mobile network operators have staked the future on growth in mobile widgets. Mobile widgets have thus far been living up the hype that has accompanied their introduction to the mobile handset. Andreas Constantinou, research director of VisionMobile, writes extensively about widget-driven mobile solutions and how widgets and app stores are driving mobile Internet usage and can be a valuable tool for discovery and delivery of operator services. Constantinou talked with Opera Insights to share his perspectives on the mobile widget space, trends in the widget arena and where the widget-filled future will lead.
Opera Insights (OI): You make your opinion clear in your recent blog post on VisionMobile that you feel mobile widgets are "the real deal" and not an overhyped "iFad". Can you discuss in more detail your thoughts about this assertion and how widgets go beyond hype?
Andreas Constantinou (AC): On the face of it, widgets are a user-interaction paradigm, i.e. a paradigm of windowed, interactive icons that offer access to services or display status of services. In many cases widgets are also associated with a navigation paradigm, i.e. x-y joystick, touch, or gesture-based navigation. As a user-interaction paradigm, widgets are an evolution of the grid-based menu system introduced by PalmOS in the late 1990s and S60 in 2001.
“We believe widgets will become the mainstream interaction paradigm for accessing information on the phone, and services on the network side or in the Internet cloud. ”
As a user-interaction paradigm, widgets have many interesting properties, which are well suited to mobile; lightweight, unobtrusive, they take up small screen real-estate and can be used to effectively compact a large amount of diverse information onto a small screen.
As such, we believe widgets will become the mainstream interaction paradigm for accessing information on the phone, and services on the network side or in the Internet cloud. Moreover, widgets are perfectly suited for discovering and delivering the 100s of operator services that so far remain hidden behind WAP menus, premium SMS shortcodes and cryptic USSD instructions.
We have seen very few examples to date on how widgets can help expose network services (incl. in the iPhone) – which is why we believe this is more than just another iFad.
Note that widgets are also associated with a Web-programming paradigm; whether widgets as applications will be programmed in Web, Java, Flash or XML remains to be seen, but certainly the Web will be one of the few remaining environments in the future, following consolidation of mobile application environments.
OI: You write about operator rationale for widget solutions and write, "What widgets lack in size, they gain in terms of market expectations." Can you talk further about these market expectations and how they are being met?
AC: Widgets are very much hyped within operator circles, especially in Europe; this is because widgets as a moniker are associated with the monetization opportunities of the mobile Web. The implied consensus is that Apple has made money from widgets, and so will operators. In reality, Apple has made money from selling hardware, so widgets are just an enabler, not a new revenue model or secret recipe. However in mobile, widgets will effectively facilitate the discovery and delivery of mobile services, so they will help break through the bottleneck of service usage and adoption.
We see widgets as a market that is at an early deployment stage in Europe, starting with Vodafone, Orange and T-Mobile. We are also seeing RFIs/RFQs in other European operators, with the US and China following the lead in deploying widget-based service discovery solutions. Note that operators in Korea and Japan have already used similar widgets paradigms in the past two years.
“We see widgets as a market that is at an early deployment stage in Europe, starting with Vodafone, Orange and T-Mobile. ”
OI: Do you think operator rationale for adopting widget solutions and their expectations are feeding widget development or is widget development happening more as a response to demand? Or both? What kinds of development and trends do you see here?
AC: Widget development is clearly in response to operator demand, which explains why not only smaller software vendors, but also incumbents (incl. Opera, Access, Sun, SurfKitchen) and OEMs (Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, LG) have developed widget solutions.
Widgets will effectively monetize service discovery and delivery only if the underlying solutions and runtimes can reach mass-market handsets. This implies that only a handful of vendors with strong operator and handset OEM relationships will survive.
OI: Moving forward, it is clear operators are viewing mobile widgets as integral to their strategy while various technology providers are offering widgets and widget platforms. As you state, we have only seen the "tip of the widget iceberg". Any ideas on what "the widgetized future" looks like?
AC: Consider how most operator services are being discovered and delivered today; discovery is through advertisements on TV, billboards or in-shop promotions, while delivery is through premium SMS, USSD (both text-based) or WAP and Web pages. We believe that widgets as a user-interaction paradigm will become mainstream for discovering *and* delivering the 100s of legacy-operator services that remain little-used, in more engaging and interactive forms. For example think about widgets used to access customer services (while conveying info on *your* phone), to show the amount of free minutes remaining in your account, check your eligibility to upgrade to a premium service, or view your popularity index in a Facebook dating application.
Widgets of course will become common UI design practice on all smartphones and main feature phones; but beyond that, they will be used as a lightweight and mass-market extension of operator and internet-based services onto most devices.
Read more about VisionMobile's insights into mobile widgets here.