by calling Iphone as the future of mobile phones, are we trying to rubbish the potential of MOBILE GAMING. All those extra buttons on s60 smartphones are essential for a gaming enthusiast and a phone with only 1 button is purely USELESS.
By the way, when is the NextGen Gaming Platform coming out?
The OS is the hardware abstraction and libraries. I suspect that Apple must have at least considered Symbian OS due to the smaller footprint (most of the firmware including signaling stack can fit on 128MB nand and leave some space for your c:\ drive).
The more Nokia are pushing for de facto and open standards, the more Symbian OS becomes a commodity, replaceable unix like OS layer. Symbian OS has good networking support, but HSDPA is primarily baseband support issue .
It's the tuning of the whole s/w stack for particular use cases that makes a good phone, not the OS - the cheap as chips S40 phones have tiny processors but boot quickly and respond to keypresses very quick. Tuning of the s/w to delight the user is much easier if you have one guy with some vision about what the end product should look like, rather than some abstract technology driven ideals.
Well a mobile phone is neither a nuclear reactor nor a manned space mission, its life though does depend on its cost and symbian seems to be the only os out there that is and will continue to be heavily optimized for cheaper hardware (read symbian 9.5). I have been hearing how the os and os x is the os of the future, well, maybe the very distant one, because no matter how hard they try, they cant get passed the single figure percentage usage, maybe the users dont want the future ? or maybe apple doesnt believe in their software as much as to actually take it out to the real computing world, were people select the hardware that fits their needs, see how stable it is then. We better hope that not everything moves into a single kernel and os design, its what microsoft has been trying to do for years now, we want options. By the way, i see the good interface of the iphone but i dont agree its anything special when it comes to hardware other than the screen.
As for the 7710 Slitchfield, ofcourse it wasnt as friendly as the iphone, but it wasnt designed to be that friendly, i was saying it was designed to be MORE user friendly than the s60 and it was. The s60 form factor back then wasnt as small as it is now and its only fair one would compare it to the phones back then and not today, text entry was way better than uiq or wm at that time. In the end it got discontinued, nobody knows what it would look like today if it wasnt.
I agree with malerocks though, there is nobody who can say what the future will be like, because we all want and use different things and no device can be perfect for everyone's needs.
wow!!iphone has a fantastic multitouch and OS but has ridiculus limits 😮 :
http://www.italiamac.it/opinioni/all-the-limitations-and-restrictions-of-the-iphone-system-3.html
http://www.italiamac.it/opinioni/come-and-see-my-brand-new-iphone.html
NOKIA IS ANOTHER WORLD!! 😉
I am still using my old Motorola A1000 but have been following the development iPhone closely. I know Apple has filed many patents for iPhone and I am sure more interesting user friendly features will come in the near future.
On the other hand, I am very disappointed with Motorola. After waiting for almost 3 years, there is still no sign of new model release. I believe many A1000 users like me will convert to iPhone in the near future.
I'm afraid SL will write another article in about 4-6 month, admitting he was wrong also concerning the maturity and capabilities of OS X on the iPhone vis-a-vis Symbian OS 9 on the other phones.
Here what the near future will bring to the iPhone (trust me on this one SL and the rest of the Nokia die hard fan club): 3G and the rest of the communication standards will be added; functionality, ease of use, and the UI gap will grow even further.
The business world will (it already started) embrace the iPhone BIG time which means bye-bye Blackberry and bye-bye high end Nokia smart phones.
At least on the Titanic they played music while it slowly sunk; here people talk themselves to death while the Symbian universe began its slow fade into oblivion.
To be continued.
a messenger
One thing I can't help thinking is just how much cheaper an S60 device is.
Nokia has a long way to go before it UI is up to scratch but in terms of how many "real" smartphones they can get into peoples hands they can't be beat.
Just look at the 6120 Classic, this phone will no doubt be in the hands of many more millions of people for a fraction of the price of an iPhone. imo the 6120 is twice as good a phone as the iPhone (based mainly on features per �$). And it won't get nicked first time you're coming home drunk on the bus!!
a messenger wrote:
The business world will (it already started) embrace the iPhone BIG time which means bye-bye Blackberry and bye-bye high end Nokia smart phones.At least on the Titanic they played music while it slowly sunk; here people talk themselves to death while the Symbian universe began its slow fade into oblivion.
To be continued.
a messenger
And of course there is a mac in every home and on every office desk right?
It begins...
Unregistered wrote:And of course there is a mac in every home and on every office desk right?
Haven’t you heard? Apparently yes, this is why gates is into charity, to take his mind off the fact that windows has failed. Seriously though, let’s all send some emails to symbian, warning them about their upcoming fall of their universe. I also know another joke about two goats, but I think we had enough laughs for one day. And then they call us the die hard fans ? Please.
Unregistered wrote:It begins...
Do you really think symbians are just going sit around and let everything happen? They will react too and come up with competiting products. Who comes up with a better one - only time will tell.
I want a head to head comparison between iphone and nokia 6630. Lets see if the age old warhorse can still win another comparison race against some new dumb eye candy.
Steve,
While I pretty much agree with this:
"... the vision behind the iPhone, of a one-piece device with no moving parts and a full-face screen that can display the perfect interface for whatever application is required, is spot on, in my opinion."
and you may well be right about some sort of new tablet phone being announced soon:
"October 2007: Nokia announce the N100, an S60-based*tablet with GPS, 3-megapixel camera, usual Wi-Fi/HSDPA*and S60 3rd Edition FP2, for availability early in 2008."
I'm finding it harder to believe that Nokia will come up with a completely redesigned S60 UI with a completely new, iPhone-like interaction paradigm for a capacitive screen device so quickly. To do so wouldn't they have had to have it pretty much finished (or at least in a very advanced state) at the time of the iPhone announcement? My understanding is that with capacitive touchscreens you have to use a finger (because even if a stylus is made of conductive material the contact area is too small). Thus the entire UI needs to be designed around finger-based interaction - not just app launching of course but every interaction with every app.
I've no idea of course what Nokia has locked away in its labs, but judging by what's out there now, it seems more likely to me that any iPhone-like device we see from Nokia in the near-term would be based on the N800, linux OS than on S60. The N800 UI seems much closer to the iPhone UI than the S60 UI does. Add to that that a new S60 iPhone-like UI would probably much less than optimal on non-touchscreen devices (so, probably, S60 would need to support two quite different UIs - adding complexity both for Nokia and third parties) and a modified Nokia Internet Tablet OS looks a fair bet IMO. The argument against I guess revolves around connectivity. The N800 has telephone functions but only VoIP and doesn't support UMTS/HSDPA etc.
I'm just throwing an idea out here and I would be very interested to hear what those much closer to Symbian and to Nokia and with more experience of Symbian and Nokia Internet Tablet OS devices have to say.
Cheers.
I remember posting a comment several weeks back that the iPhone would lead the way for Symbian to slick-en-up it's interface and physical feel of their phones. So I'm glad to hear you're saying essentially a similar thing after actually using the iphone - that the interface and the 'feel' is excellent. I think it's important that you continue to look at and review Symbian's competition in a level-headed and honest way as you're doing!
As for me, the iphone would appeal to me if all I wanted was a phone and music/video player, but actually I'm more interested in the PIM side of things.
All best,
Duncan.
Now, I could be wrong about this, but at the moment I don't think so.
I think you're off course on two of your main comments in this article, Steve.
1) The touch screens on UIQ 3 (and Windows Mobile) are not as bad as you claim. I still find using S60 like working with one hand tied behind my back, while UIQ 3, even with all it's faults (which are fixable), is a much more fluid experience. (I won't comment on WM...) The P990's pen-mode is particularly usable, and I rarely need to pull out a stylus, since the combination of keys and touch-screen is very fast and powerful.
2) The iPhone's UI is merely a good example of how you can optimise a UI via selective functionality. It appears to me, that the iPhone's UI will not scale gracefully. For example, if you want to add a search function into Contacts, how does the UI handle it? There's no menu button, on screen or off. Do you add a text field, and then pop up that enormous on-screen keyboard so that you can only see three or four matching contacts? And how about undo/redo, which Apple has pounded on for decades? How does that work? A new gesture the user has to look up in a manual?
Etc. etc.
While the iPhone looks great at what it does, I think what it does is the limit of what it can do while still being great. S60, UIQ, and WM, on the other hand, are all truly "open" UI's, and pay the price for that.
Of course, time will tell...