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

Zach over at Symbian in Motion recently purchased a Windows Mobile device just to see what it was like. He went with the HTC Touch, personally I would have gone with the TyTN II, but to each his own. His first episode in a future series of blog posts about S60 vs WM tackles an issue that is highly debated: the home screen. One of the first things people will bring up is who owns that screen? By that I mean if you purchase a device from an operator versus a device straight from a manufacturer who decides what you can and can not see every time you take your device out of your pocket?

All S60 powered devices look similar except for their background and icons depending on which series. Windows Mobile on the other hand offers developers a full blown SDK that allows them to create applications that live on what is arguably the most important piece of real estate on your phone. It used to be that you took your device out of your pocket to check the time and date, missed calls and text messages. Then as screens became larger and larger you could customize which application shortcuts you want as well as view your upcoming calender events and todo’s. This is where the evolution of S60 stopped and where the power of third party developers enabled Windows Mobile to be just that little bit smarter.

Now this might look cluttered to you, but from one screen you have your 5 day forcast, one touch on/off for your WiFi and Bluetooth radios, free memory, frequency and a whole bunch of other things that you may call absolutely useless. You are right, they are absolutely useless to you, but they might be meaningful for someone else. That someone else could, if he wanted to, create an application to go on his today screen that shows him the information he needs, put it up a website and sell it thereby increasing the Windows Mobile development community. If you’re a stock trader and you need to know how your portfolio is doing quickly and effectively than you can hire a developer to create such an application for you to appear on the screen you see every time you take your device out of your pocket. The development tools and programming language for Windows Mobile is superior to that of S60 when it comes to rapid development of applications that do exactly what you need them to do and nothing more. Better yet, you can build applications that appear on your today screen.

Sure, S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2 will allow you to create “widgets” which are applications written in the scripting languages that power the web, but you will still be limited to choosing which 5 shortcuts you can have on your S60 active screen. Yes S60 3.2 will get a new and customizable active screen, but there are no plans (that I am aware of) to create an SDK for developers to expand that screen in the same fashion as Windows Mobile.

Would S60 become even more popular for operators if given the ability to put more branded content on the active screen? I would say yes.

Would S60 become more popular for developers and users as well if they had the capability to go beyond theming and change their active screen to suit their needs? Again, yes.

I sent out an email to HTC Europe about a week ago trying to see if I could score a TyTN II. Still haven’t heard anything back, but I’m crossing my fingers.

About The Author

Stefan Constantinescu

Stefan Constantinescu (@WhatTheBit on Twitter) has loved technology since as far back as he can remember. It started with computers, but in the past few years his passion has turned to mobile devices. As a mobile phone enthusiast who lives and breathes devices that connect to the internet, he knows he is not alone with this radical fascination of all things wireless. He is strongly opinionated and enjoys a good debate so leave comments in his posts and he’ll get back to you! Stefan began blogging as a hobby in the fall of 2006 and joined IntoMobile in the summer of 2007. Later he got a job at Nokia in March 2008, but as of June 2009 he has rejoined the IntoMobile team. He is currently based out of Helsinki, Finland.

Jukka Eklund

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.
petro

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.
Zach

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.
Varun

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 ?
Carlos

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.
petro

@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.
Manny

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.
Justin Grayson

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!
Jondoe

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.
Jondoe

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.