ZenZui is a widget browser for mobile devices, aimed at delivering a rich browsing experience from as little screen real estate as possible. It does this with an interface which lets you quickly browse through a grid of widgets (36 of them) by quickly zooming in and out. The idea is that you need only two clicks two reach any of the tiles in the grid. The best way to understand how this works is to see the video below.

ZenZui was developed by Microsoft’s research lab, with Microsoft later creating a standalone company out of it. It is not offering just a product; it’s offering a business model, enabling advertisers and services to buy a part of the screen real estate they offer. And this is where the problems start. As noted by Mike at TechCrunch, Zenzui’s 36 widgets/tiles are powered by 3rd party developers or sold as ad-space to companies, and this means advertising, and lots of it. You can see the business end of it here. What I’m - as always - most interested in, is how will all this look from the consumers point of view? Will you be able to add free tiles as you please? Or will you be stuck with most of those 36 tiles filled with ads and stuff you don’t need?

Another concern I have for Zenzui is the speed. Although on the video above the interface looks quite fast (notice how I wrote “quite fast”, not “blazing fast”) on various devices, history has taught us that all applications, especially graphically intense ones, can get sluggish on smartphones.