Nokia announces Widget engine

Nokia announced Web Run-Time, a new widget engine for S60 devices. Read the Nokia press release or the PDF announcement. It will be included in the S60 3rd edition, which is slated for release in the second half of this year. Web Run-Time is based on XML and JavaScript and allows widget authors to create applets that run from an icon like any other S60 applications.

For such a young technology, the market for mobile widget frameworks is already quite crowded. Since I wrote about widgets in February, at least two new platforms have been released: ZenZui, which spun off of Microsoft's Research Lab, and uLocate's GPS-centric offering.