This year's Samsung IQ competition is now open and the best Mobile Widget for the Samsung i8910 HD this year will take out a £15,000 first prize, while second and third place winners will receive £8,000 and £5,000 respectively.

Win BIG with Widgets... read on for competiion details from Samsung Mobile Innovation

This year's Samsung IQ competition is now open with full details and support published to help you develop a Samsung Mobile Widget for the i8910 HD.

There is a lot of excitement surrounding this device, particularly at the Symbian Foundation. This is the first phone to launch since the formation of the Symbian Foundation and to celebrate they are co-sponsoring the event with us.

The best submission this year will take out a £15,000 first prize, while second and third place winners will receive £8,000 and £5,000 respectively.  All winners will also have the opportunity to have their entry distributed through Samsung's MORE WIDGETS service.  This feature is already included on the i8910 HD, but you'll soon be seeing it on a lot more Samsung handsets in the marketplace.

Why Samsung Mobile Widgets?

We are using Samsung IQ this year to introduce Samsung Mobile Widgets and get you thinking about the opportunities they present to developers. You can find out more about Samsung Mobile Widgets from the Samsung IQ 2009 resources page in the Knowledge Base, but here are the highlights:

-    Follows the W3C draft standard
Samsung Mobile Widgets follow the W3C draft standard for widget packaging and are delivered as WGT files.
-    Install to the home screen widget tray
In the Touch Wiz UI, Samsung Mobile Widgets install to the home screen widget tray. They can be dragged from the tray to the home screen, and are launched and run directly on the home screen. This makes it possible to have multiple active widgets running simultaneously. The i8910 HD home screen supports up to three separate views, so that users can switch between different sets of widgets for different occasions.
-    Support for multiple pages
Samsung Mobile Widgets support multiple HTML pages. This gives you the opportunity to offer your users richer experiences by creating multi-view widgets, and makes it possible to provide fully localised content based on separate pages for each locale.

Like all widgets Samsung Mobile Widgets are based on standard web technologies including dynamic HTML, CSS, JavaScript and asynchronous XML requests. It is undoubtedly due to the relative ease with which these scripting languages can be mastered (compared to native languages), and the level of functionality that they offer the developer, that widgets have become so popular. This is evidenced by the numerous tools that have recently become available to assist mobile developers building widgets.

Freedom to create
The possibilities for your Samsung Mobile Widget are limitless and that's why we've deliberately left the choice of category open. We want to see what you build when you're given complete freedom.
The winning widgets will be those that  provide an innovative solution to a current problem and improve the experience for the Samsung Mobile customer. They could even be widgets that you have already created modified to run on the Touch Wiz UI.
The only thing we can't be flexible on is the deadline. All widgets must be submitted by Friday 14th August 2009 for judging. Winners will be announced in late August. 

You can find a range of technical information on Samsung Mobile Widgets at the Samsung IQ 2009 resources page in the Knowledge Base