Nokia Crowdsources For New Operating System

Shashi Bellamkonda January 15, 2010 Tweet

New Nokia Symbian UI Unveiled

Editor’s Note: This article was written by Shashi Bellamkonda. He blogs at: blog.networksolutions.com and shashi.name. You can follow him on Twitter at:@shashib.

Symbian is the operating system that Nokia phones use and in a previous post you will see that Nokia is the largest cell phone company in the world. Scott Weiss user experience (UX) and user interfaces (UI) of the Symbian operating system posted this message on the Symbian developer forum:

“Nokia has presented the UI Concept Proposal for Symbian^4. This discussion is open to the community for questions, comments, suggestions, requests, and generally anything that relates to this proposal. The corresponding Major Contribution Proposals are Orbit and Direct UI.”

He also asked users, developers and others interested to provide feedback on: http://developer.symbian.org/forum/

Here is Slash Gear’s take on the UI ” they (Nokia) compare it to Android’s moveable homescreen (though Symbian Foundation has “independent unique pages” rather than one multi-panel screen), the way Palm’s webOS does away with Exit commands (but Symbian will save exit state and release phone memory rather than keep the app running in the background)”

What is cool about this for me as a Symbian user with my Nokia N95 is that the excitement has already started for me. Of course, Nokia welcomes ideas too: http://ideas.symbian.org/homepagelight and has this cool graphic explaining how the ideas get selected. Google and Apple Project Managers should probably take note.

Following is the landing page for Orbit:
http://developer.symbian.org/wiki/index.php/Prop/Orbit#Current_drafts

Following is the landing page for Direct UI:
http://developer.symbian.org/wiki/in…Prop/Direct_UI

The following link is a downloadable version of the S^4 UI Concept Proposal submitted by Nokia on 14 January 2010:
http://developer.symbian.org/wiki/im…roposal_v2.doc