There’s something very familiar about the concept that has been released for the next version of Symbian – Symbian^4. There’s been a lot of negativity around the aging Symbian OS and UI for sometime, with growing unhappiness from the time the first Nokia touch-screens started to roll out, and users feeling like the old S60 3rd Edition OS had just been shoe-horned onto a touch-screen device.
But if these early concept illustrations are anything to go by, the newly “opened-up” Symbian OS will be taking cues from the leading operating systems as well as keeping some elements of familiarity. To me this is a very Android-esque design, with a widget-style approach (that actually looks more like widgets than what the N900 has at the moment) and stylish floating palettes. There’s also a little hint to the iPhone with the multi-desktop indicator across the bottom, and a suggestion of the Maemo approach with the top title bar indicating a “drop-down menu” for more options.
Of course, this is just a mockup shown on concept devices, so there’s nothing to hang your hat on at this early stage, but it makes me feel like things are headed in the right direction for Symbian.
Find some more information here:
- Orbit: http://developer.symbian.org/wiki/index.php/Prop/Orbit#Current_drafts
- Direct UI: http://developer.symbian.org/wiki/in…Prop/Direct_UI
- Symbian UI Concept Proposal submitted by Nokia on 14 January 2010: http://developer.symbian.org/wiki/im…roposal_v2.doc
