fonefood widget for new Nokia 5800 XpressMusic and Nokia N97

December 11th, 2008

fonefood on Nokia 5800 XpressMusic (photo from Symbian Freak)

A few weeks ago we developed a widget for the newer Nokia smartphones, as a handy starting point to get into our fonefood restaurant booking application.  It can automatically determine your location, and set the language to match the language of your phone.  Location is vital for the mobile lastminute.com experience.  Everything we sell has a location, and we think that people on the move are much more likely to want immediate and nearby things to do.  So we’ll try any new way to make location-based search simpler.

The bad news was we hadn’t been able to get hold of a device to test it on.  Neither the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic nor the N97 have launched in the UK yet.  So although our widget was live, we’d decided not to announce it.  Recently, however, various enterprising bloggers around the internet have spotted it and given it a try.  Luckily, it seems to work!  Thanks to uptian on Forum Nokia and Teo on Symbian Freak.

If you have one of the newer handsets (for instance, the 5800 is available in Spain, and clearly to Nokia employees!) the widget can be downloaded from http://m.lastminute.com.

For those technically inclined, this is created with the S60 5th edition Web Runtime.  This is a great new tool from Nokia that provides access to various lower-level phone features (such as location) to a web widget, without having to create native applications.