Comments on: S60 active standby screen vs Window Mobile today screen: Nokia lost this battle by a land slide

By: Jondoe

Jondoe — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 23:29:02 +0000

you can select what things are on home screen. I turn off all but email, calendar, text, and calls. Then i see several calendar irems.

By: Jondoe

Jondoe — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 23:22:56 +0000

If you turn off a lot of the display items like wifi search, google search, etc then you see several calendar items. I turned off all but email, calls, mms, and calendar.

By: Justin Grayson

Justin Grayson — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 06:02:05 +0000

I actually don’t mind my screen on home screen on my e71…but here’s my question. has anyone figured out a way to have the home screen show more than one appointment at a time? Like, if I have an appointment at 2:00 and another at 3:00, I won’t see the one at 3:00 until after 2:00. I cant stand that!

By: Manny

Manny — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 11:09:26 +0000

I agree with you but I would also like to add that it takes an extra second or two just to load the home screen in Windows Mobile devices and thereby slowing the device down.

By: petro

petro — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 06:03:57 +0000

@Zach; I totally share your opinion and am pretty confident that the S60 dev and business teams are working hard to come up with a good concept and offering to compete with WM standby screen flexibility.

By: Carlos

Carlos — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 14:58:47 +0000

I agree that S60 needs SDK access to the S60 active standby screen, but not everything in the Windows world is brilliant. For example in some HTC P3300 you cannot know the battery level unless you run the Energy applet , the today screen in the HTC Touch is very nice, until you try to use it with just the joystick and you realize that they don’t know what is a consistent focus policy.

By: Varun

Varun — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 14:16:26 +0000

My Nokia E61i desktop does not come anywhere near the Touch. Windows beats Symbian and Nokia handsdown in this scenario . Time to get a Windows mobile ?

By: Zach

Zach — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 17:31:26 +0000

Great article Stefan – and thanks for taking this discussion a step further.

@petro

Regarding preventing a “hijacked” look, the beauty of the WM Today screen is that you can very easily pick and choose the exact content that you want on your home screen. In the original article linked above you can see that using a simple menu of check boxes I can pick and choose the Today components. I can even lose the large HTC Today component (digital clock, email/sms/missed calls, weather and launcher) if I so choose and replace it with a third-party Today plugin that has the style of my choosing. Hell, if I want I can even leave the whole Today screen blank…

S60 needs to take the same approach. DON’T tell the user what he/she should have on their home screen. Instead, create a flexible programming environment where developers can use their talents and creativity to give the user as many options as possible.

By: petro

petro — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 16:50:34 +0000

Operators can customize the S60 stanby screen by creating and activating their own plugins. afaik one of the main reasons for not providing the stanby screen customization APIs to 3rd party deves is to ‘protect’ the UI layout from being ‘hijacked or misused’ by ill behaving ui components.

I do agree that the current S60 approach is not what it should be, i.e. 3rd party standby screen plugins should also be allowed at least in some way.

By: Jukka Eklund

Jukka Eklund — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 16:49:54 +0000

Once again you’re very much on the point here. Standby screen is really underused even by Nokia internal development (products), in Eseries devices you get some basic info on there about messages etc. but that’s it. I am also not aware of any possibilities for 3rd parties to have access to active idle in FP2.