Is Symbian’s User Interface In Trouble?

I think that today the most important criterias to buy a phone is not functionnality but the interface and ergonomy. Due to the iPhone, people had change they vision of the phone. They want something who works, they want simplicity, feeling, and a beautiful interface, not only a state of the art product. The iPhone is not an high end product, it’s only a phone which allow to work, surf, listen the music easily. It’s not the case of Symbian.

Symbian is clearly outdated. They lost the first battle but not the war. The only solution I see is to make an intuitive, beautiful, simple interface. Looks at HTC Sense on Android or WM phones! It’s very attractive! Symbian have to work about the menus. actually is too complicated to use this O.S. After the iPhone the competitors have to make a better interface on their phone.

Yes. They do. This is being delivered in Symbian^4 by Nokia, but we haven’t seen much because let’s face it, why should Nokia reveal all before they release devices with said UI? Even before that, improvements are being made to the UI in newer Nokia devices like the X6. Also, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I’ve played around with Android. It’s ‘superiority’ in terms of UI over Symbian is *massively* exaggerated. Anyway, what makes you think UI is as critical as made out by almost every blogger and journalist out there? Top 2 in the market? Symbian (46%) and RIM (20%), which if you ask the same people have the two worst UI’s out there. Maybe bloggers just need to get over it…

I have to very much agree. It is in deep trouble! I used the E71 for a year and it is a great device, after that I used the N97 , could not last a day, now I have an iphone!. I have to say that as much as I was against this device it is at least 10 years ahead of the N97. Specs are not what make a good phone u can put as many pixels as u want, the iphone is far more than the sum of its specs mainly because of its OS, nokia keeps announcing high spec phones that are practically….. Useless and u cant get a good phone by making an old os became touchable

Agreed, Symbian can’t be hoping to have a new interface in 12-18 months that is similar to what their competitors have NOW. When it comes to my next handset, I think that I would rather go with one of the more established systems, perhaps Android. Seeing as there are so many teething problems with S60 5th and the hardware they put it on at present, imagine the problems with something even newer.

Go play with the Droid for a week, delve deep into all the app development for Android, and then try to figure out what Symbian is still giving you that everything else isn’t.

When my i8910 falls apart, my next phone will be running Android.

Honestly I don’t know anymore… The Symbian Foundation’s OS map looks viable, but they need a product now to generate some well needed positive feedback. Nokia may have given Symbian OS to the community, but it still needs to be first in backing it up and supporting it by example and not future wishing. I don’t have a degree by any standards, but it sounds to me like they need someone to shake things up the Symbian Foundation! To wake them up, before it’s too late. Symbian has a lot of potential at so many levels; someone just has to bring it all together now. Come on Nokia; you owe it to your loyal followers to bring back innovation and quality to your portfolio.

The “Wait till Symbian^4″ line doesn’t work for me. We won’t see Symbian^2 devices before mid-2010, this means that realistically Symbian^4 phones won’t hit the market before 2012 at the earliest. I can’t wait that long. Not when Android 2.0 is scheduled be released in 1H 2010, and 1.6 is already here and doesn’t look too shabby.
Symbian will probably live on and even prosper displacing S40 at the lower end of Nokia’s portfolio, but its days as a mobile OS for the high-end segment of the market are over.

No. Its not in trouble and the SF doesn’t need to show what licensees may or may not use beyond what they have. As the holder of thw platform, SF needs to make sure that the entire suite (front end, backend, and dev tools) work together so that licdnsees can create the best experiences for the user. For this to happen, SF needs to contine to do what they have been in changing the way they looks at apis and apps. Next is the developer and licensee connection, then we see stuff pop out.

They are an enabler with a lot of lessons to remember and forget from where they’ve come from.

I think that the key to revitalization of the Symbian platform is Qt. If you have ever played with the byzantine Symbian tools you will be shocked with how much easier application development is with Qt.

Nokia needs to get Qt for S60 our of beta as soon as possible and get the Qt libraries in firmware upgrades to their phones. If that happens I think we will see a deluge of new applications.

On the user interface front Samsung and Sony Ericsson seem way ahead of Nokia in the UI department. This will probably continue because TouchWiz and the new Sony Android UI will probably be ported over if they continue to make Symbian powered phones.

It pains me to say it but, I think that Nokia needs to do some *restructuring* in the departments responsible for their user interface designs. The excuses given by Nokia executives for the UI and the resistive screens (it was designed this way for Asian markets) are transparently weak. If I were CEO of Nokia I would simply buy eico design, the Chinese company that designed the Meizu M8 user interface. That phone is endlessly mocked, but this design firm was able to create an interface that equals the iPhone at least in appearance. Just go here http://www.eicodesign.com/case/22.html (text in Chinese) and look at the onscreen keyboard. The world’s largest cell phone company was incapable of this and may not have anything that looks like it for years! The saddest thing is that they obviously didn’t care about backwards compatibility because of all the broken Symbian 3rd apps.

Right now the N900 is receiving a ton of hype and buzz, but just wait until the reviewers get the device in their hands and realize that it only operates in landscape and that the screen is resistive yet again. The X6 is also getting a lot of buzz because they are finally releasing a phone with a capacitive screen, but unless they have completely redesigned the onscreen keyboards it’s going to be a huge disaster.

Nokia needs to separate the wheat from the chaff. Fast. Their CEO needs to stop hanging around with Dave Stewart and save all the money they are spending on record company licenses and just buy Spotify.

Anyway, enough ranting. I feel like an Apple fan in 1996.

After being one of the biggest Symbian/S60 geeks on the planet from the 3650 through the N95, I finally jumped ship to the iPhone – the reasons? UI & browser. Is the iPhone perfect? Far from it, but at the end of the day, I LIKE using the iPhone, whereas I got TIRED of using S60. The iPhone just works, does what I need it to (for the most part), and stays out of my way. S60 took a lot more work and setup to get to some of the simplest things in the OS… and it was SLOOOOOOWWWWWW from a UI perspective which just got damned annoying.

In the end, I think that Maemo is probably the way forward for Nokia (well, I should say it SHOULD be the way forward, but I’m sure it won’t be) – but if Symbian wants to survive, they at the very least should be TALKING to the Maemo UI guys since from what I’ve seen of the n900 interface it’s much better than what Symbian has shown so far. Having a new UI out in 18 months? That a lifetime in the tech world!

-olly

I agree and give negative comment about Symbian OS GUI.

It’s true,
UI is face of OS,
it tells many thinks to normal users.

i hope symbian will work on this or they will be doomed.
Nokia must take some serious changes in S60.

I think both Symbian and Nokia need new blood in their companies. In many ways, they way they churn out products new is like the way Motorola did in the past: ‘something worked in the past, so let’s not change most of it’ but just repackage it a little and sell to the gullible public. This is clearly evident in Symbian v5. I don’t mind the fact that it looks like v3 but the most of the interface was obviously not thoroughly thought through, let alone thoroughly tested with honest user opinions.

I think there needs to be someone in Nokia and Symbian who needs to be brave enough to go against the grain of their products and stand and say ‘let’s figure out what users truly want.’

However, strategically, perhaps Nokia/symbian does not want to re-capture the upper ends of the market in these few years(let that to apple and samsung i guess). In that case, the symbian v3 is good enough. However, eventually in the next 5 to 10 years, more and more people will emerge from the lower rungs of the market to better phones and that is when Nokia’s market share will fall inexorably if it does have have the users’ interests in mind.

For me, i have given up on the symbian v5.

This reminds me too much of Android which I don’t like. Apparently my feeling on this is different than a lot of people out there. I don’t care how dressy an interface looks if the phone itself doesn’t have the functionality I want. I like the way S60 5th on the N97 looks for the most part. I would definitely change the design of the signal/battery level area, making it smaller yet keeping the ability to tap on the area for shorcuts to new messages, connectivity, voicemails, missed calls, etc. My problem with S60 lies in how slow it is moving from screen to screen(hardware issues) and the stupid double tap which is starting to annoy me now (stemming from the fact that it wasn’t designed to be a touch only interface to begin with).

I like where Maemo 5 is with the UI somewhat. It’s very S60 like in terms of look (color and icon wise), which is nice, but it doesn’t support portrait orientation, and is missing a lot of the things that really have nothing to do with the UI but have to do with aspects of applications (no equalizer, MMS, voice dialing, wtf?) and a complete lack of call send/end buttons and a menu button. That doesn’t work for me. The dashboard button makes up for the Symbian key sort of, but it’s still not there.

How about this: Multiple homescreens, up to 5, with one that looks like the N97′s widget homescreen that’s just for widgets if you want it to be, all of them fully customizable, with a feature that lines things up making the screen look neat and organized. My homescreen with all my contacts would act like the contacts bar on the 5800 XM, whereby tapping on a contact brings up a screen showing your activity with them, allowing you to call them, go to your threaded SMS feed with them, or whatever. The Symbian key stays and continues to double as your menu key/task manager key, but when you press and hold it to bring up the task manager, it gives you a Maemo 5 Dashboard look. Shrink the status bar area (signal and battery status area) down to the size of the Androids, keeping the ability to tap on it to bring up shortcuts to things seen there. Give us the ability to choose whether or not things in the menu are in list form or icon form. Rearrange the Settings sub menus yet again. Get rid of double tap to open things, and add tap and hold for an options menu to pop up. That’s all I want. Is that too much to ask?

Hi Folks,

See lots of interesting comments on Nokia and Symbian Foundation, some healthy speculation and some very valid fustrations- Suffice to say anyone within Nokia shares those fustrations too and we are working to address them.

I can say there is a lot going on at Symbian Device within Nokia, some of which will be visible soon, some later, all very very positive. So the message is don’t give up on Nokia as we are definitely awake :)

Please also bare in mind, the SF presentations and version show what frameworks are being contributed (register on SF web site if you want more info), but of course not what Nokia is actually doing with the underlying UI and user-experiences. The latter is driving the SD whole organisation.

I wish I could say more as it is exciting, so apologies that we have been very quiet.

Cheers,

Kevin

Couple of links (documents I know in the first)

DirectUI>> http://developer.symbian.org/wiki/index.php/Prop/Direct_UI

YouTube QtStudio channel worth checking out>> http://www.youtube.com/user/QtStudios

Of course do not get hung up on any UI look and feel as the real thing might be very different ;) These are demos but show what Qt can do- so just use your imagination a little.

[...] still has a ways to go. It has a weak user interface (UI) that is supposed to get better, but that describes much that is wrong with Symbian today. Everything (source code, revamped UI, [...]

[...] still has a ways to go. It has a weak user interface (UI) that is supposed to get better, but that describes much that is wrong with Symbian today. Everything (source code, revamped UI, [...]

[...] is saying Nokia will abandon Symbian, or Symbian will die, or Maemo will replace Symbian or Symbian UI is clunky and outdated and many more. [...]