Video: Behind the new Nokia homescreen – multiple homescreens coming soon?

In this video, the Nokia designers explain how the homescreen, as we have seen on the Nokia N97, has come about.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C35s7ZLm1go]

Initially, I wasn’t sold on the subject when I heard about the homescreen – I thought it was like Nokia’s “active standby” just slightly beefed up.

Having used it for over a couple of weeks, I’ve grown attached to it. I’ve got 2 shortcut widgets, giving me access to 8 frequently used apps from the homescreen.That’s good, but what I really love are:

• email widget – with nokia messaging pushing my emails straight to my phone, I can glance at who it’s from and the subject of the email.
• gravity widget – the latest tweets from Nokia related contacts
• facebook widget – latest facebook statuses from my friends/family as well as info on new messages/requests.

Without even having to open up my email/gravity/facebook app, I can glance at the information already on my homescreen…I can either ignore these widgets or if there’s something that interests me, with a tap, they all open up really quickly. These three widgets have kept me more connected to those networks more than I’ve ever used those networks before – and all without being chained to a computer.

Only gripe about email widget is that it doesn't show all the email in the inbox - instead showing email from one particular account. I have several email addresses routed to a single gmail - but the widget doesn't know that and only shows email sent directly to that one account

Multiple Homescreens

It’s a shame though that we’re just stuck with a 5 widget screen and then just a blank one.

Sometimes, I want to have the music player widget on there, so I can pause/skip tracks without going through the player app, but to do that, I’d have to swap a widget around – and the five I’ve previously configured are the most convenient for me 90% of the time. It’s not just music widgets, there’s others I’d love to have quick access to, depending on the situation/location I’m in.

It would be great if we had multiple homescreens giving immediate access to preconfigured combination of widgets. Perhaps, 3 homescreens accessible by horizontal swiping. e.g. from the main/middle homescreen:

• a swipe left could change the layout to a work oriented homescreen – emails/stocks/news/calendar
• a swipe right could change the layout to a “home” homescreen – music player/facebook/bbc iPlayer
• for a blank homescreen, you could have vertical (up/downward) swipe – or being greedy – just have the upward swipe for blank homescreen and have a downward swipe for the classic/5800 style homescreen?

Another touch of laziness/convenience I seem to have already written about in a previous post:

Also, what if these multiple homescreens were to change for different locations, as determined by the GPS. This would be great as you don’t even have to remember that “Oh I’m in work, I need to have these sorts of widgets to tell me about X and Y”, once you set a few locations, the phone remembers where you are and changes settings accordingly.

We may see such multiple homescreens soon on the Nokia N97. At around 01:55 of the video, Lee Cooper asks, what next? To which we’re told “one idea is multiple homescreens…you might have one for work, one for home and one for the gym”. Fingers crossed it comes to the August firmware update (as well as bug fixes!).

via Nokia Conversations

Tags: 5th Edition, Homescreen, Multiple Homescreen, N97, Nokia, Nokia N97, Nseries, S60, S60 5TH EDITION, Symbian

Category: 5th Edition, Nokia, Nseries, S60, Suggestions, Symbian, Video