Widget UI breaks free of CDMA

A MOBILE handset content delivery platform – which emulates desktop widgets – has finally broken free of its Cdma One shackles. Celltop from Aricent is now being pushed at GSM operators courtesy of a J2ME version.

Celltop is designed to make it very easy for mobile phone users to get straight to mobile content without having to click through five million times.

The catch is that, to date, Celltop was available from only one operator – Alltel – and only on handsets that ran Qualcomm's Brew environment. Which was more than a tad restrictive.

Coming to its senses, Aricent has recognised it might sell a few more licenses if it had a version that wasn't restricted to Cdma One and worked on handsets that didn't need to use Qualcomm's chipsets.

Furthermore, the company has released SDKs that will enable Celltop to run on J2ME phones not just those with Brew and Uione.

Aricent is obviously hoping that the strong similarity between Celltop and creating widgets that run on a PC desktop will encourage developers to build products for the Celltop environment.

Alltel – the US mobile operator – was so enthusiastic about Celltop that it would only 'range' Brew enabled handsets.

It remains to be seen if this environment will readily translate into a product that GSM network operators or content providers will happily buy into. µ