Widgets confirmed for Windows Mobile 6.5

There had been rumblings the past couple of weeks of widgets being built into Windows Mobile 6.5, and now Microsoft has come clean — they're here.

From the Windows Mobile blog:

A good way to think of a Windows Mobile Widget is as a “Portable chunk of the web” or just basically a rich internet application.  Widgets are written using all the web technologies we know and love (HTML, CSS, AJAX, JavaScript) and, since they are powered under the covers by our new internet browser, they have full access to flash and other ActiveX controls available on the device (Like MediaPlayer).

The interesting thing about our Widget Platform is that it allows them to look and feel, to the end user, as a normal standalone application does; they have their own start menu icon, they show up as an individual apps in task manager and, most importantly, they have full control of the SK menu bar as any other application would

Right now this is all kind of developer-oriented. Microsoft is making use of a new standard for widgets that you code monkeys can read more about here. The rest of us will have to make do with these screen caps for now, though we hope to learn more out of TechDays and TechEd the coming months.