Handful of Nothing

Well, for the first time I will totally disagree with people comments on the latest announce from s60. It doesn’t look (based on the movie) like a iPhone rip off. It looks a lot more like nokia and builds on top of s60 to offer the touchscreen people were expecting to have on s60. Before that only the 77xx phones had touchscreen on the Nokia portfolio but they didn’t see too much light =)

What I think stills a little bit too close with the iPhone is the concept phone shown, as you can see in this second video:

(the video also show the availability of sensors, and the most important : flash lite 3 with video support : rocks hard)

As far as I think the “home” button is crucial (instead of a enigmatic menu “icon” button) again, making it rounded and with a white circle can draw too much bad attention to the device.

Again, Nokia is “reacting” quite well to the critics made to it’s industrial design. Look at those announced Xpress music phones :

This guy in particular is so sexy (you need to hold one in your hands to understand better) that there is no particular reason other than bad feedback to Nokia use any of the key design elements on the iPhone at least in a particular first touch based model.

Another thing that keeps me thinking is : how Nokia is going to provide a very good stylus & finger driven interface. If you say that you’re going to support fingers and stylus one thing is a hit : every single thing should be accessible by the finger (as it needs to be bigger) and of course you can easily replace the finger by the stylus (and use some n800 pressure tricks to pull down the correct keyboard for the task). BUT please the whole ui should REALLY take care of these small details to do not fall in the N800 problem : Some things are finger driven, and react like that and others aren’t. They are simply “stylus” only and they will be quite hard to use without one (system tray etc). Apart from that the shown interaction of pop down menus also can be quite complicated for a main screen menu. Unfortunately there’s one thing about touchscreen devices: you need to use the whole screen to give users options in a high level menu. It just doesn’t make sense to organize them in pop down menus, and expect the user to : select, scroll and then select again in a list that gives you a little bit more probability of pressing the wrong option. (Of course this is based on a low quality you tube video, but it’s my impression as ui designer).

Look how small this list is for a real world finger interaction

I really want Nokia to do one thing right: The phone part. “One hand calling” shouldn’t even be there because it’s not a must it’s mandatory on any phone. Even the iPhone with a “crap” phone part do that. So how Nokia can prevent some of the worst iPhone errors (like at least 2 touchs to go back to the phone in the first version, fixed on the second part), bad call log (no distiction between missed, incoming and out calls ) - (more on the review). Nokia already has this on the phones, so it’s time to just put on even better use.

Apart from some comments, I Really like the flip the phone thing to silencing it, but if I was granted the permission to copy one thing from the iPhone (or from the phone who did it before) it would be simple switch for silence. This is truly a great feature from the iPhone, and makes me pretty happy just to switch it instead of pressing the power button (on top of my n95), if it locked I need to unlock it first, then press power button again, then comes the menu, I need to go down a few times and press select. It’s just too much effort to do something that should be as simple as switching a button.

Apart from that, one detail funny when thinking of Canola was the scrolling screen. If you observe well, there’s a selection, that keeps itself there while the list is scrolling, and then “magically” moves to a touched item. While I understand the goal of “hey let’s put a selection here to allow the user to browse with a 4-way rocker, I also see the design complications of such choice, specially when you are using fingers and have a lot of selection based screen transitions. So just for a notice, we killed that on Canola (sorry hardware guys) you’re a really going to make some lcd pretty dirty.

So, it seems that the market leader is fast on the track to regain the position as UI ruler in the mobile world, and I really expect that this turns out to be the best thing the iPhone did : Woke up the incredible UI sense that Nokia left back in the navikey era.

Why I cheer for that? Expect to see my full “ok, after using the iPhone here’s my review” post about why the iPhone is a INCREDIBLE (but crippled) internet tablet, but a really, really poor phone, a crippled ipod, and a particularly bad communication device, and why I really want a up to the iPhone-UI for a Nokia device.

So, cross fingers and let’s cheer for a whole industry improvement on the UI side.

ps: A observation goes to the fact that the video is almost 60% of the lady running on her life and only 40% or less of UI action. I know Nokia wants to make clear : That it is not stopped waiting, and that the older video is not really the UI plan, but the video just looks again a little bit like a placebo. A fake or vaporUI just to calm down the ones who are asking for a “punch” back from Nokia. Nokia knows how to do it, and will do it in the right time given the actual scenario. Round 2… fight!

update (also in comments) to the “do we need stylus & finger driven ui”:

“I also think so, BUT as there is a demand for finger, there’s also a demand for stylus based(or I will supposed there is because I don’t have any data on that).

I know that a lot of people gets quite upset with the fact that your screens goes REALLY dirty when using fingers. Come one.. I have an iPhone and a N800 and they both are really dirty. So there’s no real way today of keeping your screen clean unless you use a stylus (but other problems arise from that)

So After physical feedback, the killer think will not be a UI will be a screen with some crazy advanced nano technology that keeps things clean =)”