Widgetize Home-Screen Of Nokia 5230, 5800 (And other s60v5 based phones)

Nokia’s touch phone have a great advantage of being user friendly. More importantly some of Nokia’s phone viz. Nokia N97 mini, etc allow one touch access to any desired application or bookmark right from its widgetized home screen! However, not every touch phone (s60v5 running OS) has this functionality of widgetizing the home screen. Especially Nokia 5800 being the most deserving of the lot as well as Nokia 5230 (Amongst the most cheap mobile phone offers with almost all the functionalities as that of Nokia 5800).

For this reason, an open source application with the name Widgetizer has been developed for all the Nokia touch based mobile phone running OS s60v5. Widgetizer is a small application with installation size of few hundred kb’s which runs quietly in the background without being a stress on battery consumption or ram usage. It allows you to place few useful icons viz. Music player, Bluetooth, Torch, Bookmark (web) and Date (HTC version) on the home-screen similar to that of Nokia N97. The procedure of placing the desired icons is simple, all you need to do is open the app, select the icon, change its appearance configuration (height, width, etc) and tap on save. Upon doing so the icon(s) will appear on the homescreen.

My Review

I was looking for a similar app to widgetize the home-screen of my Nokia 5800 and Nokia 5230. I would call this app as an initial step towards a great homescreen widgetizer mobile application. The reason’s being:

• In terms of configuration, other than ability to change dimensions of icons, this app has nothing else to offer.
• It doesn’t allow you to disable auto-start (not bad but an option must have been there).
• Limited number of icons (currently only 4 are there).

This being said, what i like about this app was that it sits quietly in the background without you even realising it’s running (not shown in menu) and the icons on home-screen are flexible i.e their location can be adjusted as per the needs. In a nutshell, Widgetizer isn’t a utility i would use or recommend to other Nokia touch phone users but improvements in the above mentioned area’s in the next release can really make this a must have application for Nokia s60v5 based touch phones!

Download Widgetizer (Version 1.04) from here.

NOTE: You need to sign the application first before installing it. Refer this article explaining steps to sign an application “Sign application for Nokia phone”.