We’d argue that the “wow” factor still isn’t there quite yet, but we’ll admit: Symbian^4 is clearly going to be a bit of a departure from the versions that came before it. The Symbian Foundation has posted the first handful of home screen UI shots on its developer wiki recently showing redesigned widgets, app categories and search, pop-up menus, and a standard-issue numeric touchscreen keypad — and unlike Nokia’s concept videos from before, these are from a real emulator running real code.
Good! But looks like Android, doesn’t it?
Wel, there’s not much more innovation possible for a finger touch ui. Gestures, icons, scrolling, and the like… it’s all been done before. Some look nicer than others, but none of them are actually innovating anything new.
My first impression was it was Android too. There is a nice mix of iPhone in there too…
Not saying that’s a bad thing. Apple and Google stood on the shoulders of many others (including themselves 😉
I guess we will need to see what comes out in 2011 before we know for certain they haven’t given us something new (mixed in there somewhere)…
Good luck, it’s a big job for someone…
Meh, I think the more important matter should be how well it runs when compared to Android/iPhone/Windows Phone 7. There is too much fixation on ‘different for the sake of being different’ rather than actually refining an already working paradigm hence the reason why so many projects fail to get anywhere – focusing on things that don’t really matter to the end user.
Symbian looks good but the question I have to pose is whether there is a future for Symbian given that Nokia has pretty much killed off Symbian for all but the lowest end phones with their Linux distro being used on the smart phones. With that being said I’d love to see an adventurous person make it available for netbooks and tablets because to be honest I am not particularly excited about seeing largely a monoculture emerge in the mobile space.
You might want to fix the headline.