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Sunday, May 25, 2008
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Desktop, laptop, now celltop!

Anand Parthasarathy

Aricent’s Indian engineers create widget-based content for mobile phones

It has a suite of applications, all latched to the net
Can be displayed on mobile phone, TV screen or PC

— Photo: Anand Parthasarathy

Aricent’s president Sanjay Dhawan and celltop screens.

Bangalore: When the desktop personal computer went portable and became a laptop, it reduced the size of the screen — but the websites one browsed on the Internet had the same look and feel, even when scaled down. Cellphones further shrunk the screen size, but now it was too small to display web pages in the same way. To get over the challenge, the widget or web gadget was born, a tiny programme that ran one Web application at a time and displayed it to be readable on the average mobile phone.

Now India-based engineers of U.S.-based Aricent, the world’s largest independent communications software developer, have taken the widget concept to its logical conclusion: “We give you the Celltop,” they say, “the cellphone version of the desktop.”

Last week, Aricent announced global availability of the Celltop, a suite of applications or cells, all latched to the Internet: one pushes continuous weather information for your town; another updates the prices of the stocks and shares you are interested in; a third sends you live cricket scores, a fourth consolidates the news in a way you want it: mixing global and national headlines with feeds from your home town.

Aricent president Sanjay Dhawan says the application works with both Java and Brew — the two programming environments that fuel the GSM and CDMA mobile phone. “The beauty is: the same cell can be displayed on a mobile phone, a TV screen, a PC or a notebook computer, as the user moves from home to office.”

The Celltop fundamentally changes the way mobile users can access Net-based services. Watch out for Indian mobile operators as they offer added value services based on the widget concept of the Aricent Celltop, and it is something ‘made in India’ for the world.

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