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I don't think it looks like the iPhone. It looks worse.

it looks enough that a comparison is valid imo.

as in, the same gloss and black baseline.

You know other phones existed before the iPhone with a very similar interface, right?

I think overall the interface is rather poor though. Looks like preliminary mockups by someone with a weak design background.

that may be true, but like it or not the iphone (like the ipod before it) have put touch interfaces in the radar of joe average. so in a sense, its become the new baseline that one will compare everything to, even if there where similar devices before it.

hell, if one look at the DAP market, creative had the first devices out. but they where to large compared to the storage they had. i recall one such device that someone in the local area had. it was as large as a cd player, with 1/3 the song capacity or there about.

that may be true, but like it or not the iphone (like the ipod before it) have put touch interfaces in the radar of joe average. so in a sense, its become the new baseline that one will compare everything to, even if there where similar devices before it.

In USA, maybe. In Europe SonyEricsson UIQ-based smartphones are common even for the average Joe, so touchscreen interface is nothing new here.

dont forget, where USA leads, the world goes. this still holds true. just look at the number of people waiting for iphone in europe.

the number of people waiting for an iphone in europe will diminish faster than OS/2 warp users if they dont get 3G.

mobile tech in europe and asian regions is far more advanced and in the hands of more average joes than in the US.

Most people here wont pay over £200 if it doesn't have a reasonably fast network connection (not including wifi) why would they be prepared to pay £500? (and yes, even fanbois have a limit)

No, no, no - everyone knows that Apple invented graphical interfaces for cell phones. Just like they invented USB, the mouse, the laptop, CD ROM drives, portable MP3 players, SMP, and oh, let's say "the metric system" while we're at it

But they did invent a user interface style that is a huge leap in usabilty. Feature for feature you could say it's been done but, for example, the Google Maps on the iPhone can tell you what you need to know in the time you have waiting at a stop light where on other phones you would spend all your time navigating.

So if you compare use cases rather than just features, you'll see the real payoff.

But, to get back to the topic, the problem is no one wants to pay for QT or rather, force commercial devs to pay for QT to use their platform. This means you're stuck with GTK. Which leads to a bigger issue: if you want an open source project to take a huge shift, you had better have the developers to back it up. You can't freeload. Look at WebKit, Apple didn't try to convince the khtml devs to do it for them, they applied their own resources to the project and let the community build around the fork.

Edited 2007-08-14 20:57

this kind of look is not so different that you can already find on palm os...... you change color, look and so on...

The comment seems to apply to the successor to PalmOS Cobalt, the never officially named "PalmOS for Linux" that Palmsource was working on when Access bought them and changed the direction of the product.

This is not to be confused with either the Linux variant that Palm is using on the Foleo, or the Linux deal that Palm has just announced with Wind River.

Didnt Access buy BeOS from Palm also?

Access bought PalmSource, which was a public company, from its stockholders. PalmSource owned the rights to BeOS, and so Access bought it.

Access has already said that it is unlikely that it will open source BeOS.

After seeing ugly themes time and time again, it seems to me that it is a limitation of the underlying UI framework that is difficult for a theme to cover up. The only exception is the SLED theme but even that falls back on the awful default Yes/No buttons with aliased icons.

im guessing GTK...

No need to guess. Access has said that they're using GTK.