Video: Symbian UI Concept

This video was shown in Symbian CEO, Lee William’s keynote at SEE 2009. It’s supposed to be an artist’s concept of what Symbian UI will look like in the future. Note, this is apparently NOT in the Symbian roadmap.

It’s about a mashup of information – integration of social network/services.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yQv18fS660]

…hmm a little rant…

I’m feeling extremely pessimistic about the future of Symbian. Watching the actual keynote itself, I’m left with a sense of apathy. It was all very vague, “we are going to make x better, we’re going to improve x”…HOW exactly? Maybe I didn’t get what he was talking about as I’m not a developer and don’t appreciate perhaps the things a developer might?

I missed the part where they should have talked about delivering the simplest, slickest, most innovative UI to the consumer. Above all the features they could add to Symbian, it means nothing if they’re trapped in a horrendous maze of menus, ugly option settings, and needless click after click.

In the keynote, Williams tries to make a dig at Jobs for claiming iPhone OS as having the most advanced mobile OS whilst lacking copy and paste.(maybe not most advanced OS but definitely UI wise)

What makes iPhone* and Apple in general “advanced” is their execution of their products and services. Apple products just works. It’s not necessarily the features they bring (you can always add features later, erm, copy and paste). It’s now all about pushing the user experience to the limit.

I’d like to be proven wrong with Symbian and see them some how (with Nokia) grab the top spot in people’s minds when you think of “advanced/state of the art/most innovative mobile OS”. Though it’s getting extremely hard to have such faith when we see Nokia’s high-end future siding towards “mobile computers” with Maemo.

Tags: aPPLE, iPhone, Lee Williams, Nokia, Symbian, Symbian Foundation, UI, Video

Category: Rant, Symbian