Orange made a very interesting announcement yesterday regarding their support of widgets.

Their tie up with Widget Behemoth Netvibes is a big positive step towards adopting widgets as a platform. This ties neatly into the conversations that were going on in Barcelona about unified app platforms. Ericsson, for example, use widgets as the basis for their unified app store strategy that they launched at MWC. Blackberry were also making a big push around widgets in their App World stand.

Of course, widgets is one of the potential routes for those trying to implement a unified application provision for all handsets. Widgets being essentially small websites wrapped up and delivered as off/online experiences.

As they are standards based, and work on any number of platforms, it means that most phones (Orange say 80% of all phones) can access these products.

This does mean that there are varying levels of access to handset and network APIs, depending on what handset a widget is sitting, but for simple service concepts widgets, we believe that widgets have huge potential to tick all the boxes, especially for brands and agencies looking for a greater reach or different demographic to the normal iPhone app campaigns.

So, the Bunfight goes on!