The device being used is a touchscreen tablet. The OS is S60 with the Touch UI (demonstrated last Oct). This is the alpha version demo of the next S60 OS… which means it lacks more than half of its final features. That’s what everyone has forgotten before heaping criticism on Nokia…Gizmodo is complaining about the lack of animations & the same S60 look. But let us remind ourselves that one of the main specifications of the new Touch UI is to maintain backwards compatibility. Actually, Nokia is still working on it… ensure maximum applications compatibility. The very first step is to make the kernel work & then the inputs & outputs, then interactivity, etc. The UI is actually the last step since it’s built on top of everything else…
Nevertheless, this preliminary demo does show that Nokia is really working on making the final S60 Touch UI better than the render:
Ok, this render is all slick & everything… But I think Nokia can do better than this…
My suggestions:
- Change the UI completely. Having a S60 Touch UI is something of a giant step in itself. S60 is the most popular mobile OS in the world. How about a complete reshuffling of the UI?
- Look at those icons… who uses them anymore? Haven’t Nokia seen the iPhone? Oh come on… bring up some really cool icons!
- If Nokia is going touchscreen… why not multitouch? Multitouch with stylus support would be awesome… pinch, flick, slide, rotate, etc.
- Make apps that take full advantage of the touchscreen (games like on the Nintendo DS, iPhone widgets, etc…)- Implement voice recognition into the Messaging… so that you would be able to input text by voice.
- Get a higher resolution… QVGA on 2.8-inch isn’t really impressive. How about VGA & above on the much larger touchscreen?
- Nokia should make a new media & video player that should be one of its main attractions – maximum media support (DivX, H.264, Ogg, WMA, AAC,…) As a reference, Nokia should look towards the iPhone’s iTunes’ UI & Microsoft’s Zune.- How about a new battery? As I’ve recently pointed out with the N96 950mAh battery, as the more gadgets you have, more juice is needed.
- Full-screen landscape QWERTY touchscreen keyboard
- Master the full potential of all the sensors… For example, the accelerometer could be used to control the phone!!! (Tilting the phone will make you go top of a list…)
- My last advice: Nokia should… Think Different!
The hint: Think of porting features of Microsoft Surface on the S60 Touch…
Video on S60 sensors & what they can do…
More info:
Gizmodo
Engadget
AllAboutSymbian
BGR
S60 Blogs
Please don't spam & don't swear!
Subscribe to my feed
Post a Comment
Some html tags like <b>, <i>, <a> are allowed & emos can be used. ;)
Copy your comment before posting in case something fails.
Comments are moderated, may take a while to appear.