With the addition of cameras, music players and more, mobile phones are becoming increasingly more integrated with consumer electronics and a staple of everyday life. BetaNews spoke with Nokia’s top user interface guru, Christian Lindholm — once dubbed the “godfather of mobile phone users” — to discuss the design challenges prevented by such convergence, and his new project called Lifeblog.
Nokia Interface Expert on Phones, Blogs
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I like my rather old Nokia phone UI, but isn’t this the company that has put out a series of phones with bizarre keyboard layouts?
And I don’t much like the new 4-way selection button that newer Nokia’s have. I find it far too easy to accidentally go sideways when one will mostly be moving up and down. Other phones that have larger 4-way buttons or rings don’t seem to be as fiddly.
I don’t know if any of this is addressed in the article. BetaNews appears to be having problems ATM.
Ummm…..
The words “Nokia” and “interface expert” don’t belong in the same sentence unless it’s “Nokia needs an interface expert”.
Case-in-point: The N-Gage, a metal croissant/boomerang device whose first version required removing the batteries to swap out the game cartridge.
Their button layouts ARE indeed weird as DCMonkey pointed out. The Vodafone 3G V702NK has one of the worst buttons I’ve ever seen. (url: http://www.vodafone.jp/japanese/products/model_3G/v702nk/index.html) The directional pad and the select key are essentially one and this makes it a horrible interface for real time games (more often than not your character moves unintentionally when pressing select).
Nokia needs to steal some engineers from Sharp (url: http://www.vodafone.jp/japanese/products/model_3G/v802sh/index.html) or Toshiba and pull a U-Turn now.
…that there were times when Nokia phones were best in terms of useability (even when having unusual key layout: see 5510)