The presentation that was held by UIQ Technology at the Symbian Smartphone Show 2008 in London is now available for download. It contains some interesting facts about UIQ Touch (err... I thought UIQ supported touch since day one?). Also some cool design concepts which will probably hardly see the light of day. Anyway, the Powerpoint file is available for download from UIQ.Com.
Read on in the full article.
Yep. Those guys "get it" (UI, Interaction) better than Nokia's team.
Or is Nokia dipped into legacy too much?
Definitely the S60 Touch UI is a mess, sometimes scrollbars, sometimes fingerflick scrolling, flashy new menus piggybacked to the Active Standby, single click, doubleclick, same old softkey option menus/submenus, stylus, etc. They should have started from scratch.
Sergey, well, I would reserve that judgement. One of their conclusions is to stay close to your platform and be cautious. S60 Touch is doing exactly that at least for the time being.
Unregistered: have you actually used it? Having options does not necessarily make it a mess. Stylus is an absolute must for e.g. the Chinese marget. Also, see my comment above. Starting from scratch would made it a completely alien new UI for everyone. Nokia didn't want to do it. Benefits and cons to both approaches.
guys...isn�t Symbian Foundation supposed to incorporate some UIQ tech??? So, why can�t we expect the know how of those UIQ engineers to be incorporated on the evolution of s60 v5 into the SF OS??? I think so...
The debate of S60 5th Edition is going to run and run (I've been having it internally as I write the 5800 preview). I don't think there was any choice but to draw on the existing S60 - clearly combining touch and softkey into a single platform is hard (UIQ 3 demonstrated that). Overally my impressions of S60 5.0 have been good. I've been pleasantly suprised given the doom and gloom surrounding it.
That said I definetely think there's a lot of scope for getting input from UIQ into the first unified version of the SF platform.
Rafe, really look forward to reading your more elaborated thoughts on that... wink wink.. 😉
viipottaja - Monday is the day (I hope), though you may spot in on the site over the weekend. Trying to explain things concisely is challenging!
Practically any OS or interface with a large following has to dip into its legacy, it has to avoid alienating existing customers, and backwards compatibility may also have to be considered.
Windows and Macintosh both have weird quirks that are only there because they were in previous versions, and probably wouldn't be there if they were designing an OS from scratch.
If Windows or Mac were starting from zero userbase in 2008, I very much doubt they'd look or work exactly the way they do. But neither MS nor Apple would want to do that, because they'd be throwing away loyal customers. Symbian S60 is in exactly the same position, it's bigger than all its rivals combined, which makes it very hard for it to take risks with its design.