WRT Widgets from Vodafone (Betavine)

Vodafone has made available, via widgetvine.mobi, a number of WRT Widgets which have been developed by Vodafone's Group Research and Development department. There are some genuinely useful widgets available such as cinema listings, travel planning and news retreival. Read on for more information and a few screenshots.

Widgets can be downloaded directly from the widgetvine.mobi site. You can either download them on to your computer and then install them to the phone or down and install directly on the phone.

The majority of the widgets are country specific, although there are also a number of generic ones. The widgets range from relatively simple news retrieval through to more complex front ends for a number of web services.

Widgets

Tube Mapper is a widget for planning trips on the London Underground system. It can also be used as a way of easily viewing the London Underground Map.

In planning mode you choose the two stations you wish to travel between, the widget will then go online to get route planning information before showing you, on the map, step by step instructions of which route you should take.

London planning

The Vue Cinemas widget shows the screen times of films currently playing at your local Vue cinema. For each film you can view summary information (including a list of the cast and a short description). Via the Options menu you can also opt to view the trailer, view a review, or view the IMDB page.

Clicking on a time jumps you into a page of the Vue website, which lets you book tickets to the selected film (sadly the booking site isn't really optimised for use on a mobile phone).

Vue Cinema

Some of these widgets are excellent examples of what can be achieved with S60's WRT technology with a bit of effort and imagination. What is notable about both of the widgets we previewed above is that they go beyond the simple web page or RSS feed reader that we have seen in other widgets - they feel much more like applications.

Rafe Blandford, All About Symbian

Published by Rafe Blandford at 12:10 UTC, August 12th

Categories: Software, Links of Interest
Platforms: S60 3rd Edition

News Discussion

Tzer2

Comment: That tube map widget does look particularly impressive, and most importantly it looks like the kind of thing people might actually use on a phone instead of just showing off to friends.

nparayo

Comment: I tried the tube map one but I cant understand why it needs an internet connection? It pretty useless if your actually underground although i suppose you do have a mobile map.

The flight arrivals departures app is pretty good but you cant just see a list of flights you have to enter the flight code for a specific flight. So you may be better off just visiting the BAA flight arrival site directly in your mobile web browser, although you can initially find the flight number using the website and continue to view status on the flight in the app.

Unregistered

Comment: widgetvine.mobi isnt up right now, says its under construction. betavine doesnt have a vue widget accessible by search, where did you find this?

Unregistered

Comment: yes, i see the "under construction" too , how to come through?

Unregistered

Comment: where did you get this from, and how do you know its from their R&D department. Looks professional to me?

Bosambo

Comment: The widgets are cool...but an on-line tube map makes no sense unless it's giving me travel news.

Here is an off-line London tube map Java app. Ignore that is says it's for a Sony Ericsson phone, it works perfectly on Nokia N95.

[URL="http://wap.tfl.gov.uk/kcml/tubemap/downloads/TheTube_SONYERICSSON-S700_v1_0.jar"]Download[/URL]

Better to download from your phone as it's a Jar file.

Unregistered

Comment: Looks like widgetvine.mobi is back up now. I like the cinema one, especially as it only accesses the network when the information it already has is out of date, clever.

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