Nokia presents the new concept of user interface in Symbian^4

21st January, 2010 by Adina
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Nokia has submitted a proposal to Symbian containing a guide for how the 2010 operating system, Symbian^4, should look. The new layout represents a refinement of an early sketch and includes multiple home screens and widgets, such as Android. The interface should have a less cluttered aspect with menu bars that can vanish and also a primary menu involving only top-level items for applications, music, images and contacts.

Nokia wants a more consistent and attractive interface. Like Android, power and application notifications should appear in the central area. Multi-touch should be an option, but it is not clear how pervasive it should be.

The operating system should change Symbian’s behaviour in a significant way and should preserve a previous state of an application instead of leaving it running in the background, so that frequent memory problems determined by such behaviour are avoided. Automatic filters instead of manual procedures are used to sort the applications. The Qt development framework should support the applications with their new features as well as grant a relatively easy creation of similar applications for Symbian and Maemo at the same time.

These proposals are not guaranteed to be accepted, but Nokia being Symbian’s single large customer, chances are big that they are approved.

The new operating system is believed to be very necessary for Nokia as it lacks an operating system really optimized for touch outside of the Maemo specialized platform. Handsets starting with the 5230 to the N97 mini use a modification of Symbian S60 that provide essential touch features but does not change the methodology of the interface.


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