That big football tournament in South Africa is dripping with stories like a thick layer of frosting on a 10-foot high cake. Will brilliant Brazilian goal-keeper Julio Cesar lead his team to the Cup title? Will Ghana’s Kevin-Prince Boateng, born of a German mother and Ghanaian father, find himself opposing his half-brother Jerome, who plays for Germany and is in the same grouping as Ghana? Will the loss of German star midfielder Michael Ballack to an ankle injury during the Chelsea-Portsmouth game sink his team’s chances in the World Cup? Will the suspension of star player Franck Ribery for personal behaviour issues poke a huge hole in the French team’s midfield? And won’t we all miss seeing a Russian team led by the great Andrei Arshavin in the this year’s tourney?

These stories and much more are instantly available for free on Nokia S60 5th Edition and widget-enabled S60 3rd Edition devices through ESPNsoccernet.

ESPNsoccernet is one in a large stable of sports widgets powered by Plusmo, now a part of AT&T interactive. The widget is a powerful tool that pulls in team and region news coverage, live game visualization, match commentary, team tracking, detailed fixtures, tables, and more. You get not only ESPN’s latest tournament coverage and stories, but also Premiere league and other soccer stories depending upon your choice of team settings.

I tried the app on my Nokia N97. The first step was setting the language, where I had my choice of English, Spanish, French, Italian, and German.

Choose language from amongst English, Spanish, French, Italian, and German.

Then, I picked a region of interest from choices that included the five language countries, plus Scotland, the USA, Europe in general, and a global option. I chose England for demo purposes. If I had switched to Europe, I would have also had access to UEFA and Super Cup stories.

With England as a selection, I had a choice of Premiere League and FA Cup stories. I chose the FA Cup, and it then displayed the most recently played match.

Selection of a region determines which sets of stories will be chosen by the ESPN soccernet RSS news feed mechanism.

The icon list on the right-hand side includes my favorite teams (the star icon), schedules of selected teams (the calendar icon), articles about the teams (the newspage icon), and a change settings icon (the three dots). I clicked on the news page icon to see the list of stories, shown below.

Click on the newspage icon to have the RSS feed pull up the current stories about your team(s).

Clicking on any headline brings up the details of that story for perusing. S60 5th edition devices allow touch scrolling, while S60 3rd Edition devices use the rocker key for scrolling.

The full article can be viewed by scrolling, and related articles can be selected and accessed.

At any time, I could also switch my settings to another region or team just by clicking on the three-dot icon. I found that it was better to specify my teams very narrowly in order to sip from the fountain rather than the powerful firehose of all ESPNsoccernet coverage.