Scott Weiss, the User Interface Technology Manager at the Symbian Foundation who I interviewed before back in July of 2009, has just posted the user interface proposal Nokia has given to the Symbian Foundation for Symbian^4. When Nokia purchased Symbian in the summer of 2008 and made then proceeded to make operating system open source piece by piece everyone was dazed and confused. Now things are much clearer once the dust settled. The Symbian Foundation is just a governing body with a shiny new public relations campaign aimed to give people a glitter of hope. The people working on the actual Symbian software are still the same old Nokia employees, but today they’ve got new job titles. Going open source was Nokia’s attempt to get other people to help contribute and fix the aging code, but they’ve failed since developers would rather pour their time into creating iPhone applications that while trivial, can actually put food on the table. Maemo isn’t in any better shape, but that’s a different story.
It’s not all doom and gloom however, for many of us who like to keep it old school Symbian is just fine. BlackBerry users are in the same boat. The transition to Symbian’s Touch UI hasn’t been well received, and while yes, Nokia can drive prices down thanks to their massive scale, just how much is a customer willing to sacrifice in terms of user experience just to get a device with better specifications at the same price point compared to the competition?
Anyway, at the end of the day you don’t care about any of this since you buy a new device every year and chances are you’ll end up using the web browser more than any other application. Operating systems used to be a valuable thing, now they’re the very definition of a commodity, and they’re all doing the exact same thing, albeit with different user interfaces. Whether it takes you two clicks, a swipe and a button press or four clicks and a double tap, you get what you need at the end of the day.
Here is what Nokia would like Symbian^4, due to be complete in Q3 2010, but not shipping on devices until the first half of 2011, to look like:
[Via: Unwired View]