Samsung IQ 2009 now open: £15,000 first prize

This year’s Samsung IQ competition is now open and full details have been published. At Sammi we’re using Samsung IQ 2009 to promote Samsung Mobile Widgets. These widgets reside in a dedicated widget tray in the Touch Wiz UI and run directly on the home screen area. The list below gives you the basics of these widgets and what you can do with them:

• Install to the widget tray on the home or “idle” screen
• Display iconified in the widget tray
• Can be dragged to the home or “idle” screen, can be launched on-drag or on-touch, and run directly on the home screen
• Can arbitrarily resize, can display multiple views, and can display live data independently of and simultaneously with other widgets
• Multiple widgets run simultaneously
• Are developed using HTML (UTF-8 encoding), CSS, and JavaScript
• Are packaged and deployed as ZIP format file archives (UTF-8 encoded pathnames recommended), with a WGT file extension, and are defined by config.xml, index.html, and icon.png files with arbitrarily many additional HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and image files, following W3C recommendations for directory structure
• Are recognised (on Symbian OS) by the application installer and loaded to a dedicated widget folder

By focusing on widgets we’re hoping to achieve two things during the course of the competition:

1. To get our current members, and the mobile development community generally, to think about the possibilities that the advent of web-runtime technologies on the mobile open up.
2. To reach out to new groups of developers who previously may not have considered developing for mobile, but who with the arrival of widgets on mobile devices, now have the ideal skills to capitalise on this opportunity.

As the entries are submitted this year we are hoping they will come from a range of individuals, including those who may not have considered themselves as mobile developers. For more information on the opportunities that widgets have opened up for developers, have a read of our latest Technical paper from Ben Morris.

While right now Samsung are giving developers the opportunity to Win big with Widgets, I can’t help but think that the widget story has only just begun…