(Click here for a larger view of the Zumobi Summer Games Edition)

The Zumobi Summer Games Edition, pictured above, is a simplified version of Zumobi's zooming user interface and mobile widget platform for Windows Mobile. The full version, version 1.0 of which was released in February, offers a grid of 16 thumbnails (right) that users can navigate by zooming into a quadrant, then zooming in again to a "tile."

Tiles, potentially customizable by the user, include content from Zumobi partners such as AccuWeather.com, Amazon.com, The Associated Press, Flickr, MTV, and others. Content is not only cached on a device, but also continuously updated over the air, so users should have an unlimited data plan, says Zumobi.


A collection of Zumobi "tiles"

The Summer Games Edition of Zumobi comes with only four tiles, each dedicated to various Olympics news and content. However, users can add other tiles from an on-phone "tile gallery." Up to 12 additional tiles can be added, the company says.


The Zumobi Summer Games Edition also runs on Apple's iPhone
Also announced was a version of the Zumobi Summer Games Edition that runs on Apple's iPhone or iPod Touch (pictured above). The iPhone version features a four-pane interface very similar to the Windows Mobile version. However, Zumobi provided no information about whether iPhone users, too, can add additional tiles. No iPhone version of Zumobi has been previously announced.

Background

Originally developed by Microsoft Research, Zumobi initially ran only on Windows Mobile 5 and 6 smartphones. Zumobi was known as "ZenZui" when the product and the company of the same name were spun off from Microsoft in March 2007. The eponymous product was subsequently released as a public beta last December. Microsoft subsequently agreed to distribute Zumobi with Windows Mobile, though details of how that will be achieved have yet to be released.

Pledging to offer "an open, device-neutral platform for building and deploying rich content for mobile phones," Zumobi has also released a beta version of its SDK. That version will allow developers to create their own tiles, which they can upload to the "Zumobi Gallery."

For more details on Zumobi, see our earlier coverage, here.

Availability

The Zumobi Summer Games Edition is available now from the company's website, here.

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