03 July 2009

Mippin Launched Set Of
Homescreen Widgets For Nokia N97

Mippin, the brilliant news and content discovery service just announced they have released a set of Buzz Widgets for the Nokia N97.

Mippinsays that S60 version is the next step in its commitment to provide the best experience for each phone, and in turn further enhance content discovery.

Mippin is a browser-based, mobile-optimised service delivering a huge range of content sourced from across the web to a mobile site that is individually personalized using Mobile 2.0 features to drive discovery of new and favourite content for each user.

It is partly a testament to Nokia that their latest operating systems are sophisticated enough to run a Mippin Buzz Widget, but also because Mippin is once again fulfilling its goal to connect mobile internet users with the content they’re interested in.

With mobile consumers increasingly keen on a simpler mobile user experience, there’s more and more interest by developers like us in the phone’s home & idle screen real estate.

As users access more of their content and services via this area of the phone’s UI, the development of a selection of home screen capable widgets gives Nokia users a huge range of content choice, while importantly the cross platform availability of Buzz Widgets reflects the trends in mobile consumer behaviour.

As consumers choose different ways to interact with their favourite web content on their mobile, Mippin is in a great place to distribute publisher’s content in a format optimized for the content, the user’s phone and now the user’s needs.

When accessing Mippin on N97, users will find latest news stories incorporated into a front page carousel, providing an easy way to get to the news and information that matters most to them. The carousel then gives way to the many Mippin features that now integrate directly with the Nokia N97 touchscreen interfaces to enable better navigation and access to personalised content.

Four Buzz Widgets will be live from today on all Android phones and also on the Nokia N97. These are:

• News Buzz Widget - the very latest up-to-date news
• Gossip Buzz Widget - the latest celebrity news
• Gaming Buzz Widget - the latest gaming news
• Tech Buzz Widget - the latest technology news

Each Buzz Widget gives you a choice of different categories

• The News Buzz Widget enables users can select different categories of news, from All News, UK, USA or World News.
• The Gossip Buzz Widget brings you the top stories from the world of Entertainment, Fashion & Beauty, Gossip, TV & Film, Music & Bollywood.
• The Gaming Buzz Widget gives you Nintendo, Playstation, XBox, Gadgets, Tech News or a mix of all categories.
• With the Tech Buzz Widget, you’ll get Tech News, Mobile News, Gadgets, Gaming, Tech Video plus Android or Symbian depending on your handset.

All widgets allows users to select their choice of refresh rate, so if you can't live without knowing what's going on in your favourite category, you can get the latest stories automatically on your phone every 5 minutes, 24/7!

Once downloaded, the widget enables easy customisation with the settings button, to choose your preferred type of content and refresh rate. Then as the stories are downloaded and updated to both Android and Nokia devices, the home screen displays each story headline as it happens - if you then click on the headline it opens the full story, including pictures and video capability. Once a story has been opened, you can either read the whole story by scrolling your finger up or down the story window, or you can browse other stories using the navigation buttons located at the bottom of the story.

Hopefully you'll find it a doddle to use. Other things we should also mention are battery consumption and content downloading. We've been very wary about battery consumption because these widgets are highly addictive. To prevent high battery consumption by default the widget only goes online every 30 mins to get the latest content and it keeps this content in memory and then saves the stories' text to disk.

Because the text is saved to disk, you can use the app even when you don't have a network connection, which means it's the perfect solution when you can't get online or if you're on a fast moving train, or even faster moving plane (even if the phone has been switched to flight mode!)