Nokia Offers Glimpse of Symbian Facelift 114
Barence writes to mention that Nokia is giving users a first glimpse at what promises to be a completely overhauled Symbian user experience this coming year. Nokia's chief exec blamed the user interface — as opposed to the OS itself — as the root problem. "The company will roll out a completely re-engineered user interface in 2010, aimed at addressing many of the criticisms associated with the OS. 'We will reduce the clutter and improve the input methods including multi-touch and single tap,' Kallasvuo told delegates. 'It should be just two taps to get to your favorite music or videos, rather than eight. We'll improve browser experience so that it's a quicker, flash improved, media experience with pinch-to-zoom and so on.' And, Kallasvuo wasn't stopping there. Aside from completely redesigning the interface, he also suggested that future Symbian OSes would be much faster."
Re:My Question Is (Score:5, Interesting)
The way I've always understood it (Score:0, Interesting)
The major problem with Symbian is that it's difficult to develop compared to the operating systems it competes with, or so 'm told by a developer friend.
So, what's being done about that? If the answer isn't"something significant" then I find it difficult to believe that essentially copying features that other OS's already have will be sufficient.
Re:I have an N97 and an N900 (Score:3, Interesting)
I can completely agree about both the N95 and the N97.
For me the N95 broke new ground and really was an impressive device when it was released. The fixes did a lot to help usability and stability.
The N97 is the Nokia device which has pissed me off so much - that I've become stuborn and vowed to never, ever again own another Nokia Symbian device. It's a complete disaster, even with the much anticipated v20 firmware.
I get a free company phone of my choosing, and I could've taken the iPhone at various times but I stood my ground on the principle of it being a "more free" device in terms of application choice. Now I'd be happy to give all of that up just to have a device which has a slick UI, does the basic functions perfectly and isn't so frustrating that I want to smash the device into the floor or throw it out of the car window.
Nokia really have to improve - they have no other choice - otherwise I believe they will lose the smartphone market.
As good as the N900 is or promises to be - I refuse to believe the hype or to be an early adopter. I'd have to see the phone in action in Real Life first before even considering another Nokia product.
Re:I have an N97 and an N900 (Score:3, Interesting)
Complete nonsense. The original name for Symbian OS was EPOC 32, and it was developed for the Psion 5 - a touch screen PDA. So in actual fact, the OS and APIs were designed from the outset for touchscreen as well as keyboard.
Re:I have an N97 and an N900 (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Apple... (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, the Apple fanbois are out in force today. Nokia's interface design has warts, to be sure, but the general S60 interface is derived from the old non-smartphone interface that has been carried on phones ever since GSM became popular (one navigation key, one select key, one cancel key). Compared to Siemens or Sony-Ericsson, the Nokia interface isn't non-intuitive at all, and since the majority of European phone users are used to these interfaces, S60 isn't a big change.
So the Apple fanbois like your parent are obviously talking about things they know nothing of. What else is new.
Mart