Where are my iPhone Widgets?

Many of us that have been using Android devices know of its many pleasures that have been around for a while. Going down the list, I think my favorite points are probably the App drawer, the many home screens (on which you can place or remove any app for easy access), notification bar with pull down access to any new notification (I even find myself trying this on an iPhone every now and then to no avail), Gmail threading, and multitasking. But my favorite feature above anything else is the ability to add a widget on your home screen!

Now I will concede that with iOS4, the iPhone has received many of these features, like multitasking and threading emails, and has possibly done a better job at it than Android. But still lacking from iOS is the ability to use widgets or even any semblance of a real home screen to place them on.

Now a widget can be something rather annoying or it can be the best thing since sliced bread. Basically what it boils down to is a slimmed down version of an app right on your home screen. Examples of this would be a clock or picture frame, or even just an icon that could perform the function of an app when selected, like say an LED flashlight app. And with the multitasking feature in the Android OS, the use of widgets is practically seamless, and I hardly ever have a reason to even open an actual application.

And this is when it hits me — iOS just received the biggest most sought-after feature ever: multitasking. For nearly three years, Apple had been curtailing this highly demanded feature by stating that they want their users to have a device that could potentially last them the entire day, a statement that seemed justified after experiencing the quick death of my Nexus One every day. But now that they have finally decided to give in and provide the customers with what they wanted, what’s next?

Well I say the next frontier is Widgets. Could you imagine being able to see new Facebook or Twitter updates without ever opening an application? Or even play music and skip through songs straight on your home screen? Or even a simple widget that tells you the projected forecast for the week in your area? All of this is already possible with any Android device on the market today.

I’m hoping that sometime in the future, say around the release of iOS5, there will be an amazing new feature added that lets you choose which applications show on your home screen this way, and hopefully my desire for widgets on an iPhone can be fulfilled. And knowing Apple, they won’t be the first to get it, but they will be the best. But until then, I think I might stick with my Nexus One while it still has some battery left for the day.