No, don't get too excited, this isn't an official device. And we don't normally go overboard on fan-made concept devices. But Nikolay Andreev has gone to significant lengths to mock-up and explain his ideas for a Nokia nWAVE smartphone , taking design cues from Nokia's 7710 and Apple's iPhone, allied with N95-level hardware spec. Well worth a watch and comments welcome.
Read on in the full article.
What I instantly like about this is the idea of using application icons to convey additional information, thus blurring the distinction between the "indicators" at the top, the "active idle" plugins on the standby screen and the various application launch icons.
Perhaps this could be used as a starting point for pulling back together the various related ways of doing similar things that are now found all over the S60 UI (e.g. the letterbox symbol at the top of the screen, the inbox preview on the idle screen, the launch icon for the Inbox on the idle screen, the launch icon for the Inbox on the menu screen and the symbol next to the inbox in the messaging application telling you that you have got mail).
Less state is more. 😉
Some of the iPhone's icons already do that. Example: calendar icon's number is always today's date.
This and the iphone just shows how cluttered and how 1980s the S60 UI is, the problem Nokia have is that the iphone is real while this mock-up is not.......
Nokia appear to be creating new apps, desktop suites, numerous hardware devices, games stores, music stores, but fail to focus on the key point - the UI and how people interface with the phone. Have been a Nokia user and could not see what the iphone did any better but after using the UI in depth it is years ahead in usability, the underlying hardware has some failings but cannot fault the UI.