I liked the screenshot with the home screen, but watching the video…
The impression I get is that besides being a brand new device it is slow as hell. At least if they are really running Windows of any sort they didn’t do only a shallow UI, and in the video you can see how far they went on replacing (possibility) the lame windows shell.
The main screen looks quite welldone, but when going into some other screens it looks like they also needed to rush. The pictures and video playback screen looks rather poorly designed. (also the photo zoom is the tip about slowness)
Anyways, it’s surprising to see in times of iPhone speed, a top company releasing a sluggish device. Product Owners seems simply not to learn, or they have this hardwares thrown down their throats. I think I will become a monk.
Well, I always thought that the n95 looks didn’t express too much it’s real inner power. The Nokia flagship product last year still a incredible powerhouse (capable of bringing iphone to it’s knees if it had one - feature wise) but the looks.. unm, the looks just don’t comunicate that. The N96 brings that whole power with small improvements but adds something important: the very nice n81 design style.
It’s fun to see how this happened a lot in Nokia overtime, with great phones like the 6230 being visually not loyal to it’s power. The 6230 was by far the best phone of it’s time but people just failed to notice it in the beginning because of the looks. It was dull, too square, and showed nothing beyond some of it’s lower end friends. If you go more into the history you will find more and more examples. The funniest part is that, the phones were so good, but really so good that in the long run all of them succeded quite well, selling (I believe) a lot, and becoming easy spotted on people’s hands.
The N96 fix one out what I consider to be 3 major “flaws” in the N95. Those mistakes are normal, and don’t make the phone worst or something, is more about not being at the same level as the features are. Design is fixed, memory (RAM) was fixed in the 8 giga version, now it needs just a nicer UI :)
One thing is for sure, after the N95 8gb I didn’t expected nokia to pull out a design revamp so fast. It’s the time for fast changes and Nokia is showing that is not sleeping. Pointing that is always easy right? doing I know it’s a lot of pain.
This was I would say more educated than Jobs review for the segway design but still a punch on the face of any one. But there’s one point… it’s always (I do that myself a lot) to criticize when you’re outside and have no knowledge of any restrictions. So it’s not unusual to have bad design due to engineering limitations and to get a smack on a face on something that wasn’t too much your fault must really hurts.
Busy day, Apple unveiled the really thin Macbook Air (of course its also because it doesn’t have Optic drive) and finally we can set a pin in the maps application on the iPhone. Nice laptop and nice iPhone software addition,but just like I thought that curling page effect just to show more buttonsand the lack of a little bit more ports can be a little bit too much.
But I really want to try out the Air notebook, it seems really light for those incredible exhaustive trips overseas. Looking forward of course to try out the new touchpad with the full multi touch support. It should come also as an update for all macbook pro owners (I wish).
——-
So my vacations were officially over yesterday, I’m full speed at work again, and back in the office in friday I think (now I think I will arrive in brazil 16:30 friday). The guys are baking up the first minor update to Canola2, as we had this time between the holidays to visit our families, and I’m trying to figure out the last pieces of some puzzle (read design problems) that are happening. The various artists albums are a small but annoying problem (but it seems to exist a part of compilation on id3).
This is the “iPhone” like phone that iRiver came with. It shows you a probably flash based UI that shows another face of the flash as UI: it’s just not enough. While it can display nice graphics, it just can handle real transitions in a big screen (everyone that develops for bigger than QVGA screen knows this problems)
My question: Why to copy in such way, and put out the thing that captivates the people most? I don’t get it. you copy to try to achieve the same, not to be lame at most. Dumb move.
Well, this deserves a post because it’s exactly what I have been saying in all my talks over the iPhone. It really takes more than just “let’s do something to mimic” and what we see in the market is a bunch of frankstein trying to awfully copycat the phone without having the thing that really makes what the iPhone is: A guy who understand that user experience is everything, and that pushes it down into the company’s organization in such a way that what you get in the end is a device that was able to in it’s first incarnation set all the mobile manufactures 2 (I would say more) years behind when it comes to user experience (I already said that feature wise and hardware wise it sucks).
To be able to produce inspired software, the top boss has to believe in great user experience and kick everybody’s ass to get it done. In huge companies a VP will do, but management below that level will be sidelined when trying to implement proper interaction architecture and usability processes.
In the meanwhile what we get is a lot of FranksteinPhones.
My highlights from his texts :
on Features :
This circle of dependancy is diabolic. Users and features are like children and candy. They never say no, even if stomach pains will surely follow. For developers, it is the easiest thing hand out. New features are a commodity. If you have no clue how to improve your software, you can always add new features.
Incrementally improving a mobile so that it leaves the cluster and approaches the iPhone is impossible. It is actually easier to join the iPhone’s position from above, below or the right. The only way to get there, is to jump.
Well, I think I will need to remove the boo box :( the keyboard is ok and of course makes things easier. the proximity to the screen was not as bad as i thought, but for my small hands is not as confortable as it will probably be to bigger ones.
lets how this evolve with the physical keyboard
cannot express how happy i am to see the upload button enabled again :)
N810 image view, but you can also see the new task navigator, and a much better theme
This morning I saw the pictures of the brand new Nokia Internet Tablet on engadget. I was quite happy with the industrial design. It looks so much better than the N800 and it’s delightful to see the series evolution. Also the theme looks a lot sweeter than the previous “glowing” one. Of course not everything is heaven and looking from the pictures I can start talking about things that could be messed again in this released :
1) Camera looks again facing straight there on the left. This put the user in a not so comfortable position for video calling. You either tilt the device a little bit to the side or you try not bothering and do the call a little bit to the side your self. (can be a charm, come on)
2) Looks like the bevel framing the screen still high enough to bother a full finger usage BUT looks like wider.. so can be easier to you! Yeah!
3) The fullscreen keyboard with that HUGE backspace button still there. :/
4) The keyboard is really to close of the upper part that slides up. It’s not so easy to type on that :/ [4]
5) Still no centralized synchronization / media optimization software.
But of course good things:
1) Looks like at least some basic 4-way + 2 or more buttons gaming will be possible (while demanding a little bit of dexterity)
2) The whole body looks just a lot more compact and a little bit thinner than the n800 without that quasimodo hunchback. Cool.
3) if there’s really a built in GPS I’m on it (read my iphone review to understand more. Actually I will change to a link once I publish it)
4) The docking position appears to go even lower. That’s great for watching movies on today’s very very reduced user space on planes
5) The arrows (so criticized) were replaced by a small list (drop down menu) icon, and it’s not only on the application title, showing you that the menu is there, but also the same picture in the full qwerty keyboard.
6) That’s also nice to see: simplified (tray) and more lively(task navigator) not Tango-styled icons, in menu and also for the system tray. Thank you! and sorry but TANGO SUCKS (not the project, but the icon look and feel. 100% dull)
So let’s keep also an eye on this, and while this doesn’t come out check out some real life pictures from gizmodo : 1234
And for sure the comment that was more then expected:
“An internet and media tablet with 2GB memory and 4 hour battery life for $479? Yeah, I know you should be able to get that a little cheaper, but whats the advantage over an unlocked 16GB iPod Touch for $399? Yeah the keyboard is nice, but the iPod is much sleeker, better battery life, MUCH better storage, I imagine better UI for media stuff…” Click here to compare size with the iphone
He’s right in the better media UI, a lot more storage, a better browsing experience(only if we exclude flash) more battery. But he should also consider that :
exclude flash what is not possible nowdays in the web, so the N8xx series gives you real web.
You get a real GPS, not some “mockup”
You get a more flexible platform in sense of each kind of media and a good number of supported third party application
**you’ll get Canola 2.0 that will for sure be enough to satisfity the ipod UI need =) ***I wish***
So, I would advise the following : if you like tweaking, and is a power user, Nokia may suite you better. If you praise good UI experience and a descomplicated but “locking to certain applications” desktop to device experience you should go the apple way.
About Canola, we cannot say if the tearing problem is going to happen until we have a device, but if nothing was changed on the hardware side will be really sad :/. Apart from that it will be quite good to use the slide keyboard, maybe the smaller frame on screen, clean design, brighter screen, and of course an updated, optimized version of the Maemo platform.
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 =)”
Varig would for sure be just slightly above the militar, stand-still soldier position category.
I hate flighing old airplanes that were “modernized”. By modernized I mean “Less room for your legs, less space between you and the tray table (actually no space).
After 30 something hours flying, arriving in the apartment in Oulu at 2am, lots of meetings and a fast flight to Helsinki I finally have a free slot of time with my mind working at least at 33% to post something. Unfortunately is going to be a barely usable post. Also I was able to dinner with my good fellows in Oulu, Tiago, Francisco, Claudio, Igor and Erika, Meagan and her Danish friend. Nice company for a fast one day and half visit.
(that’s it for the personal diary)
Casual, good reading for all your user interaction needs :
Useful multitouch products from Thomas, talks about multi touch is more than iPhone and Surfaces. I really believe in this, and the power this can have for example in little kid’s schools. Imagine the little guys playing around in huge multitouch tables that can not only recognize shapes, but give them physical properties and enable the kids to create “incredible” machine like toys with just their little fingers? I think “little big planet” is going to be my next inspiration =)
I already liked the way Google mail does that, than Asa Raskin (yes son of Jeff Raskin) wrote about it and you can read it all here with good example. I keep imagining how could I design this to be also quite easy to do on mobile devices (the very old trash bin concept?) and avoid modal warnings in the small screen.
And, while I think Sony Ericsson was the faster evolving ui, from scary to really nice, in the mobile world, these pictures (along with the others available) shows how much SE is creating a lot of different UI concepts in the same small box. Maybe this is just too much isn’t it? Maybe not… The final decision comes from the end users =)
In san francisco, Jan Chipchase from Nokia, is always a good fast reading. Now talking about Openness, but you can just click to see the Ny Times N95 Ad. Also, in the N95 field you can take a look at Stephan’s post with a Nokia Store ad “Can you phone do this?” predictable, but indeed it nailed the question. Speaking of ADs I really suggest you to look at this one:
This is pure Gondry love for the Razr2. I don’t think that phone deserved such AD =)
*Ha, I was not wrong about my feeling. this is from Gondry himself =) Nice. You can watch a interview about the ad here
Apart from that, Helsinki is now dressed on shades of green, yellow and red and I’m really sad I cannot go outside and take a lot of nice pictures from those incredible trees =). To make it up I can only admire the availability of a “pillow menu”
Ok, A lot has been said but I haven’t heard this too much lately so it’s also good to show the iPhone downsides, and believe me: they are quite serious.
Why? Because the phone in the iPhone brings a heavy task to the device: To be someone’s phone. This implies in 2 basic things :
1) Good reception, thus good quality on your calls
2) Good volume
The iphone is CRAP in these 2 statements when compared to any of my Nokia phones. I have been walking on a low signal place with both phones and the iphone is out 50% of the time. A shame.
In the volume matters, the iPhone speakers is at the limite of usable (for voice) and it’s quite lame for music listening.
So, if you have a carrier that is “not that good”, but your Nokia/SE/Samsung phone works ok on it think twice before changing to an unlocked iPhone because you’re going to be surprised how many times it will be without carrier coverage.
Also, if you are into listening to music in your iPhone one thing REALLY bothers me: No music keys. Sometimes I just want to change music. Just that… I don’t want to slide to unlock, and then try to find the forward button just to listen to the next tune.
I think I will make a hack to allow volume to change music instead of rising the volume =) but even with that I really like my Nokia devices when it comes to music.
Conclusion: iPhone is like a “Gorgeous” cake but a little rotten on the inside. I really like to have a incredible UI but I need to remember one thing: Its using my sim card, to its my phone, and the first and most important thing is to be able to make and receive calls. I think this makes pretty clear the advantages of being “mature” on the market.
Hello Apple : a little more love on the Antennas and speakers next time ok?
Ps1 : I know some fan boy can say “but the iphone was not tested on this carrier… or your carrier sucks not the phone”, but I have been using several phones that were not even released on Brazil (thus, not tested) without carrier problems until now.
Now you can check the video that started the whole talking about Nokia cloning iPhone, and really understand what happened there.
The video shows the Nokia CEO explaining the new multimedia UI , and in the end the small portion that was the polemic one.
After watching my attention went completely to the new multimedia UI. And all I can finally say is “Ahh it was about time”. Why that? Well for some time (since N91 I think) I have been asking myself WHY. Why put a dedicated key that just open ONE screen with ANOTHER launcher for 5 applications (customizable) and that’s it ? This was present in most of 3rd edition Symbian phones.
Then, It evolved into this :
A much nicer openGL ES (I supposed as it has nice effects) screen, that is quite juicy but has one deadly problem: It’s just THAT. you click, you go back to the hell that became s60. If you take a time to go to your music listing, you going to see a list with 2 to 3 icons on each line. Unbelievable.
Ok, now I thought the new phones had the last thing, the carousel thing shown on some pictures and announced by Nokia, but the video showed us finally one thing that makes sense: the multimedia key is becoming on full (or almost I don’t know) UI!. Yes, finally. It took four iterations and now the video show a full usable thing that appears to be quite simple and to solve one of the worst problems in s60 IMHO: too much launchers. Too much applications looking different and behaving different. This is a nice step, a needed one, and while I like to criticize a lot I also now when to send the compliments for this kind of release.
The only thing that worries me (of course can be just a video thing) is that you actually need to circulate too much the ipod-wheel-like thing to scroll up and down. And this is a huge iPod problem. Once you have thousands of songs is quite boring to keep circulating to scroll a full list of songs and the scroll back up. The iPhone solved this problem beautifully with a index on the side. So I consider this thing as shown in the video a nice step for Nokia but maybe a step backwards in terms of market, as mainly Apple has at least product speaking accepted and fixed that.
About The VP speech and the final section showing the iPhone I keep my opinion : To show something that does not evolve from iPhone could not be something to be proud on, and they would be just great enough just announcing the new UI and leaving the iPhone like possibilities in the future for other occasion. The new UI is nice enough and didn’t deserve to be shadowed by a 10 sec session that wanted to show that Nokia will not stand still staring at Apple’s UI.
To read more about this from a Nokia oriented mind visit Stephan’s post. For more info about Nokia’s VP opinions about the iPhone visit this web site.
Its funny to see how companies run against Apple’s monopoly in the personal media players (Ipod) and actually can be faster than apple: Samsungs introduces it’s YP-P2 touchscreen player as a threat to the upcoming rumored touchscreen based IPod. So everything ok up to this point right? Wrong. The device is sexy, sleek, and looks incredible good but watch the video to see how crude the UI is! [link for the video]
Even worst : the bright, glowing thing on the botton is not a menu button. It’s just an indicator of something (maybe bluetooth on, battery is dying)
So this makes me wonder: if you are a big big company. You have the money to do great products (and you do actually) why such kind of mistakes leaves the company? Does any CEO or product manager tested this device, like this one and said ” Owo! that’s nice, this represents well what we are trying to do here” ? I don’t believe so. I really don’t believe so.
Please, give a little bit more love to the UI before releasing it. It saves you a lot of bad reviews and unsatisfied costumers.
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. 
