Best Buy stores Sunday began selling the equipped with Yahoo widgets, which are mini-applications that connect directly to the Web using Intel's Media Processor CE 3100. They're the first products to spring from the Widget Channel TV application framework .

This year, several other companies, including Sony and Vizio, will begin selling their own flat-panel HDTVs, set-top boxes or DVD players based on the Yahoo-Intel widget platform, Michael Greeson, president of the research firm The Diffusion Group, told The Standard. Comcast will enter into field trials with a widget set-top box by the third or fourth quarter, LG will put it into its Blu-ray players, and Toshiba is planning on using the technology for its HDTVs, Greeson said.

The Samsung "widget" TVs available so far are : The 46-inch panel lists for nearly US$3,000 and the 55-inch model costs $3,799. They can connect to the Internet either through a built-in wired Ethernet connection or via a Wi-fi connection through a separately sold $80 USB dongle.

So far only four widgets, all Yahoo branded, are available: Yahoo News, Yahoo Weather, Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Flickr. According to a , pressing one button on the TV remote loads the widget toolbar, a customizable, scrollable horizontal set of icons located at the bottom of the screen. Widgets can be undocked to see more detail without interrupting ongoing TV viewing.

According to Yahoo spokesperson Lucas Mast, approximately two dozen more widgets will be available by June and there will be 100 from which to choose by the end of the year. "We have 300 publishers interested in developing TV Widgets from individuals to large content publishers," Mast said. Available soon will be widgets from Accedo Games, Twitter, Yahoo Video, eBay, USA Today, Yahoo Sports, Showtime, CBS Entertainment, the New York Times, and CinemaNow. Others that have announced plans to develop widgets include Disney/ABC, MySpace, Viacom/MTV, Netflix, Amazon, Blockbuster, Associated Press and Joost.