Let The Widget Wars Begin

If you haven’t heard about the widget wars yet, you are about to. Last week, I moderated a panel at the Open Mobile Summit. The subject was “Apps in the Cloud,” which explored the difference between accessing content through applications, which are downloaded to the phone, and content that is accessed through a browser. One of the big take-away messages was that there’s not a “browser war,” in which Mozilla, *Microsoft*, Opera, *Google* and others, are all competing to be the browser on the phone, but there is significant and potentially bigger “Widget War” brewing. Of course, you may have to take this argument with a grain of salt since it came from Mozilla’s VP of mobile Jay Sullivan, but there’s a lot evidence backing it up.

Also participating in the panel was Qualcomm’s Plaza’s initiative, which allows content companies to create widgets for the phone, but cast a wider net, and a ton of companies could be included in this category — in fact, any company that is publishing its own developer kit that allows developers to create one-off experiences for a device, or a mobile platform. Under that philosophy, companies in the category include: , *Yahoo*, *AOL*, Plusmo, and Funambol, which was also on the panel, and handset makers are also getting into this business, with Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android, and *Sony* Ericsson’s Xperia, all having separate developer environments.

I was reminded of the widget wars today when *Sony* Ericsson announced three new “panels” for its latest smartphone, the Xperia X1. The panels provide a way for companies to create very tailored experiences, which only work on one phone. The three unveiled today are: Facebook, *Microsoft* Windows Live, and Dashwire, which allows you to sync your phone’s content to the Web. The panels can be very cool, and can leverage the high-end features of the phone, but it’s clearly fragmenting the industry even more. For instance, the new Facebook panel puts images of your friends onto the phone

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