News, sport and the weather

GLOBAL – Messing around at the weekend on the Nokia mobile site (okay, I was bored) I stumbled across what I thought was a great little app. Pocket Express packs a ton of useful info into a neat little app, offers a free version and upgrades for those who want more. When I mentioned it to Charlie though, and once he’d had a look, his instant response was simply “why is it always news, sport and the weather?”

Which I reckoned was an interesting question. Nokia is rolling out a
raft of online services, kicking off with MOSH and maps and plenty more
to come. But what is it that people want from the Internet on their
phone.

I’m a big fan of widgets and growing increasingly patient at the lack
of good widgets for my N95 (though they’re coming, I’m sure). These
micro-apps should enable me to build out a neat, custom-built phone
where all my favourite online services are available almost instantly
and update rapidly thanks to not needing to load whole webpages
whenever I refresh.

But is that the answer? Whilst portal services such as Pocket Express
remind me of AOL and Yahoo! 10 years ago (content aggregators that put
everything the majority might want in one easy to reach place) they’re
bound to be usurped by what’s coming next.

Nokia talks a lot about location-based services which I think is a good
thing, but only part of the answer. There must be something else
that’ll appeal to everyone, be easy to use and doesn’t contain
horoscopes. I’m just not sure what it is yet. Proper Digg Mobile? BBC
Widgets? What do you think?

Photo by Soctech

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• Nokia reliability – Extreme weather

Tags | app, MOSH, n95, news, Pocket Express, sport, weather, Widgets