One of the complaints that Symbian always receives is that the UI is outdated and that the available applications look like they came straight out of 2004. By comparison, 3rd party software developped for the iPhone/iPod Touch, Android and even Blackberry add amazing eye-catching graphics with animations, transitions and transparency. While I do agree that this is partially true, I also have some objections regarding the fact that Symbian applications from 3rd-party programmers are outdated.
As a matter of fact, it is easy to make Symbian software that follows the general UI on the device, take for example all of Epocware and SmartphoneWare‘s applications. Although these applications bring a ton of added functionality, their graphics are the same as the phone’s built-in software, not that this is a bad thing. They are fast, reliable, and really easy to figure out since the learning curve is non-existent to operate them. Similarly, a lot of iPhone/iPod Touch apps also follow the general UI of the said device, but because that UI is eye-candy by itself, they seem beautiful as if they took tons of hours of UI work.
But it is also possible for developers on Symbian, as well as other platforms, to make their own application UI. Sure, this takes a lot more work, and maybe a lot more effort on Symbian than on other platforms, but it still is possible. Historically, this has been almost absent from Symbian because of that needed effort, but with the advent of Gravity, users were introduced to the idea of having gorgeous applications on Symbian as well. Suddenly, it downed on us that Symbian developers had just been lazy or had lacked communication with UI designers when building their applications. The standards were highered as everyone expected more UI creativity and beauty from all the other software companies, and they didn’t deceive. Here are, in my opinion, the 7 best and most gorgeous applications currently available for Symbian.
1. Spotify
Based on a UI and code implemented by The Astonishing Tribe, Spotify for Symbian is amazing. I got the Premium account for a month, just to try it out since I had been a big fan of the free service on my Mac, but I suppose I’m now hooked to the mobile software as well. It combines all the features we have come to love from the computer version, with playlists, artist and album information, new releases, and most importantly an offline mode that lets you download songs so you can listen to them later on. The animations and transparency effects are abundant, don’t slow down the application, and both Symbian^1 and S60 3rd Edition versions work seamlessly with no hitches. Get it by pointing your browser to m.spotify.com.
2. Opera Mobile
I have been an unconditional user of the built-in Symbian browser for 3 years now, mainly because all links open in it by default, but Opera Mobile made me a convert. The functions are there, with multiple tabs, bookmarks, page saving, copying text and images from webpages, fast loading, password manager, shortcuts, speed-dial and more. But not only does it work well, Opera Mobile is also beautiful. It offers a clean UI with read and black colors, good graphics, and a software that looks gorgeous on both touch and non-touch devices with the same download file. Get it from Opera Mobile.
3. gReader
I’ve waited and then waited some more, but eventually MojosStudios came to the rescue with a gorgeous Google Reader client for Symbian. With a newspaper-like UI, colored icons to indicate the status of elements, image support, kinetic scrolling, left and right finger swapping and transitions, gReader doesn’t have anything to envy in terms of looks. The features are also extremely well thought-out, with all the options you can think of when using Google Reader, starring, sharing, emailing, marking items as unread, folder support, extensive search features, and more. Get it from MojosStudios.
4. Kinoma Play
I have yet to write my review of Kinoma Play for S60 3rd, but I’ve been using this application extensively on my E71. There’s a lot to love about Kinoma, from the features it offers, to the outstanding responsiveness, fast and smooth transitions, transparency effects, different skin availability, and tons of multimedia options. It’s a relief to finally have a multimedia suite like this for Symbian, and I’m aching to have this application on Symbian^1 because I know it will be even more gorgeous and intuitive to use on a touchscreen. In the meantime you can learn more about its features and download it from Kinoma’s website.
5. Offscr applications
I have been a fan of Offscreen Technologies since the first Solitaires application they did for Symbian^1, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. They have already made over 90 applications and games available in the Ovi Store, and all of them bring that “wow effect”. Personal favorites of mine include Elements which I use sometimes as a pharmacist, and the amazingly simple Converter and Voice Recorder which trump Symbian’s built-in solutions by miles in terms of finger-friendliness and graphics.
6. Psiloc World Traveler
I had almost missed Psiloc’s new World Traveler application if it wasn’t pre-installed on the E52 and offered for free in the Ovi Store for other devices, but make no mistake, this is one hell of an application. I’m a big fan of its weather information, homescreen weather display, world clock pane and currency converter, but it’s mostly the way it looks that makes me come back to it. The black background, the clean icons, the big fonts, and the lower scroll bar for the different tabs make it a special offer in my eyes. The currency converter also wins in my book as the most extensive one and the easiest to use: just tap one currency, enter the number and it’s converted to the 3 other ones, simple as that. Get it from World Traveler’s site.
7. Gravity
Do we need to talk more about it? Seriously? It’s THE application to have, bar none, if you’re a Twitter user. I’ve tried Twitter clients on Mac, on PC and on the iPod Touch, but none of them came close to the ease of use, the sleekness and the massive personalisation options of Gravity. I guess I’ve been spoiled. Back to the UI, Gravity brought kinetic scrolling on Symbian^1 when it wasn’t even built into the software itself, and it made scrolling fantastically fast on S60 3rd Edition. It also added smooth colors, a rebuilt UI from the grounds up that didn’t resemble Symbian in any way and an innovative way to show options through a drop down menu. It keeps evolving at a pace that no other software can keep up with, adding Facebook and Google Reader integration. Get it from the MobileWays website.
Some final thoughts
Beautifully-designed applications for Symbian, although still sparse, are becoming more and more the norm nowadays. I, personally, will always remember Gravity as the catalyst for that change and thank Jan Ole Suhr for it. Maybe it didn’t play that role in reality but was just released at the right time when the advent of touchscreen devices pushed developers to improve their apps’ UI. Still, there was a moment when, if I wanted to demonstrate a cool application on my phone, the only one I could open was Gravity.
Now, I have more choice, and I’m thankful for knowing that Symbian isn’t as outdated as many old developer houses made me think. They all unconsciously convinced me that Symbian software had to look like the general Symbian UI, which is incorrect. Apparently, it takes a bit more effort and some close talks with designers to bring the applications graphics to modern levels, but the point is that it is possible.
Where do you stand in regards to these nice looking applications for Symbian? Does function trump stylein your book so you’re willing to use any software as long as it does what you want it to do even if it looks like it was designed in the DOS days, or do style and elegance play an important role in how much you appreciate an application?
I have mixed feelings about apps with their own UI. There's no denying that the above apps look pretty compared to the vanilla S60 UI. However, there's a lot to be said for UI consistency: If you're used to how your phone's menus, softkeys, input mechanisms etc. work it can be confusing and/or irritating when something doesn't follow those rules.
An example of this is Opera which hides my signal strength indicator – unless I switch away to the homescreen or another app I don't know if I'm using 2G/3G/WiFi (which could have billing implications!) or whether I have reception at all (OK, eventually a page load will time out with a connection error, but I prefer to know in advance that it won't work). It's a small thing (and Opera is a great app otherwise) but it is annoying and a direct result of them making their own UI. (As it happens, I've also noticed that text input on Opera is a bit weird on my E55 with it's half-QWERTY keyboard).
Also, non-standard UIs will almost always ignore user's theme choices and other preferences (e.g. text size settings).
Of course, given that the S60 UI is a bit basic compared to newer UIs like iPhone it's no surprise that developers are getting impatient and improving things themselves. However, when the UI is refreshed with DirectUI I would hope that apps once again follow the standard (since they'll need to rewrite things anyway when switching to Qt). Perhaps the app developers who have made nice UIs in their apps can contribute to the Symbian Foundation and use their expertise to help shape the whole UI in future!
Japan Symbian has better UI for usability. Their UI were design by Acrodea
James Nash has it right!
Sure, you can list several S60 applications with their own UI toolkits. (You should really mention the U-shaped media menu of the Nokia N95-1 though, which was a prime example of what's actually possible on top of Symbian, if it weren't for Nokia not opening that XML framework :-/)
Point is, having a few beautiful applications doesn't help the users (everything else stays ugly), nor the developers (start from scratch or pay a lot), nor the platform. Something more advanced than AVKON _must_ be integrated, like yesterday. ^4 and Orbit are too far away.
Attractive software makes me feel better. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that I take a dull view of any software – on computer or phone – that hasn't be designed to make me feel good about using it.
Would people read a book that used nothing but the Comic Sans font?
Would people watch a TV show that was completely unedited?
Would people listen to classical music played using untuned instruments?
The smartphone industry is mature enough for developers to start showing some concern for the details, the seemingly small things that appeal to our humanness. As you've pointed out, apps like Spotify and Opera show that this can be done on Symbian.
Good post. You can also add Opera 10 that has a really nice interface. And Sensible Sudoku (it's a gama but the UI and effects are also great).
Good post Rita; and as usual, you hit the nail on the head when you said, “Suddenly, it downed on us that Symbian developers had just been lazy or had lacked communication with UI designers when building their applications. The standards were highered as everyone expected more UI creativity and beauty from all the other software companies, and they didn’t deceive.”
That statement needs to be published everywhere as a developer – for any platform – needs to understand that user interface developement, and the entire user experience framework, isn't just a matter of offering funcitonality, but a matter of making sure that the funcitonality is seamless to the purpose of the service/application.
Very valid argument James. As a matter of fact, the one thing I hate about my iPod Touch is that there is no similarity whatsoever in the 3rd party apps UI, u never know if the Settings are in the app itself or in the general iPod Settings, there's not one way to go back, or one way to interact with them, it's not chaos, it's a “swirling vortex of entropy” as Sheldon (The Big Bang Theory) would call it (http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0064640/quotes).
Anyway, the point is though, that when a UI is as dull and as old as Symbian, it is a good thing to have some apps differentiate themselves from the rest, esp when the new UI they make doesn't get in the way of the apps functionality. Now I would argue that probably the best way would be to have the different things at a set place, but to give developers the freedom to change how that is viewed (round button, square button, bar…) so that a certain amount of creativity is left without getting in the way of the user experience.
As for the E55, don't get me started on how many apps simply hate that bloody keyboard, and please don't get me started on how the french azerty is even miles worse than the english qwerty in terms of interaction with apps. Seriously.
Please refer above for my answer to James. As for it not benefiting the users or the platform, I'd argue with that. I think the new Symbian Foundation is keeping a very close eye on the changes that 3rd party developers are bringing to improve usability. As an example, I'd like to use a (very) outdated but (very) relevant story.
Back in 2006, on Windows Mobile 5, there was a couple of apps by SpbSoftwareHouse called Mobile Shell and Pocket Plus that overhauled the whole UI and added some very needed improvements to Windows Mobile. A while later, HTC started copying those improvements (in a very obvious manner to old Spb users), and made them part of their own HTC UI (think back to the first HTC Touch days), then Windows integrated them in Windows Mobile 6.5 and now 7. Did the users benefit? Yes. Did the platform benefit? Yes. The developers had a lot of trouble, and almost gained nothing out of it, obviously, other than the recognition that they started it all.
Opera Mobile is cited as the 2nd example in the post :) As for Sensible Sudoku, I love the game, but I was thinking more about apps that brought something additional to the platform. Thanks for mentioning it though, it's definitely a fine work by Ludimate.
Thanks for the compliment Antoine :)
And your second point is very valid. I would say that I don't mind that Epocware and SmartphoneWare's apps offer a basic UI, after all they're mostly utilities and they don't need to be over-complicated with graphics and such. But I would've had a lot more trouble if OperaMini came with all the useless huge toolbars and menu bars as the built-in webbrowser, or if you had to highlight a tweet and click Options to get all the different possibilities in Gravity. These 7 apps, I believe, although still a rare example of a raising trend, have a perfect design that is fitted for their own purpose. We're also seeing the same changes in Widgets as well, where the developers are having a blast out of remaking the whole thing.
Use of Typefaces is the part of any UI that I feel contributes, perhaps more than any other, to user satisfaction and therefore I would nominate “flipfont” which enables the use of Monotype fonts; using Helvetica or Goudy Sans has refreshed my phone as much as Gravity did.
symbian foundation can definitely learn a lot from developers such those mentioned above. some things also came to my attention the transition used on the s60 tend to be bland and unimaginative . more should be done to improve on it as more power users have found a way to add more effects which only shows the complacency on the part of nokia. How can handy shell replicate these and yet nokia finds it difficult to add these bells and whistles to its devices..having used the iphone 3GS and G1. i don't think it would take much to improve s60 to meet up with the other OSes
I feel strange for having seen the potential of Symbian WAY before these apps came along. I expected them to come around ever since I got a Nokia 6600. While these Apps break from the integration with the default UI, by pushing the envelope, it should give a kick to those UI designers who have been lazy over the years. Also, in the past, the technology just wasn't there in order to power all the cool eye-candy (Gravity lags a bit on my new(ish) N81 when in landscape mode), but when the tech became available, due to the age and userbase od the s60 UI, the designers took a break from improving the UI. Hopefully they'll get back on track, and with S^2/S^3 using the OMAP3430 as the base chipset, the harware support is definitely there, all we need is for the coders to wake up and improve the UI, change it completely if needed while hopefully keeping the basic API/security features intact so older apps will be able to run flawlessly
Possibly, but you have to realize that all Android devices and the iPhones have some pretty awesome hardware (128+MB RAM, dedicated GPU) while Nokia have fallen back in terms of hardware: removing the TI OMAP2420 for the much less powerful FreeScale MX300-30-based chips which lack the much needed dedicated GPU for programmers to be able to implement nice graphics without having to sacrifice application performance.
Very true and very relevant. Nokia's decision to base the last two generations of Symbian phones on a single ARM11 with DSP extensions has probably helped keep costs down, but definately at the expense of graphics performance. If you look at a phone like the N97 running most any application be it JAVA or native C++, you would probably see at least a 25% increase in general performance over the N95. But a well coded native application that takes advantage of the N95's Power VR MBX graphics chip, well… you might see a five-fold increase in graphics performance. It makes you wonder how many more impressive native Symbian apps there would be (or to put it another way, how many more developers would be willing to put in the extra effort) if Nokia had stuck with a Texas Instruments and their System on Chip solutions.
Totally agree. It's easy to underestimate good font usage.
A LOT more games, demos, video players would beneft from the PowerVR MBX, hell, it powers the PSP, and sadly the loss of the GPU is probably what killed N-Gage 2.0.
Samsung actually did release a few firmware updates to the Omnia HD during the early months, not sure abouth afterwards though… On the subject of firmware, they should have use a unified firmware platform for all devices, i.e., all devices use the same firmware, and it would truly live up to the s60's “Open to New Features” as older phones get FP upgrades. Obviously, you can't put animations on say the N91, but i'm pretty sure the N93/N93i would love them, and the new music player would be a good upgrade to all phones!
I'm using the Google Droid Sans Fonts for the time being… I also use it my in word docs and the monotype version in my IRC client
But they won't let you put any third party apps, so its a m00t point
Totally agree. It's easy to underestimate good font usage.
A LOT more games, demos, video players would beneft from the PowerVR MBX, hell, it powers the PSP, and sadly the loss of the GPU is probably what killed N-Gage 2.0.
Samsung actually did release a few firmware updates to the Omnia HD during the early months, not sure abouth afterwards though… On the subject of firmware, they should have use a unified firmware platform for all devices, i.e., all devices use the same firmware, and it would truly live up to the s60's “Open to New Features” as older phones get FP upgrades. Obviously, you can't put animations on say the N91, but i'm pretty sure the N93/N93i would love them, and the new music player would be a good upgrade to all phones!
I'm using the Google Droid Sans Fonts for the time being… I also use it my in word docs and the monospace version in my IRC client
But they won't let you put any third party apps, so its a m00t point
With gravity, how does everyone read the links posted in twitter? do you just mark it as a favourite then goto twitter in opera mini? trying to find the nicest way to do it as on my ipod touch i use tweetie and that integrates with readitlater
When you click a link in Gravity, you get the option to save it to your clipboard – you can do that, then launch Opera and paste it in. I don't personally do that (I rather like the default browser personally) but that's why the clipboard option is in there.
Yup, as Ricky suggested, I usually click on the link to save it to my clipboard, then switch to Opera Mini/Mobile and paste it in the URL tab.
What you can do to improve this experience is to go into the Options / Account Settings in Gravity and move to the last tab Tweet Menu. Under URL Options, you can de-select everything except Copy to Clipboard. That way, when you click on a link in Gravity, it autom copies it to the clipboard without giving you the pop-up menu. Next, you just switch to Opera and paste it. I use this method almost 10 times a day and saves a lot of clicks and time.
Oh and for the record, you can also use the Instapaper option, Instapaper being a very similar service to Read It Later, with also an ipod touch app, so u can keep ur links in sync b/w the phone and the ipod.
Thanks for the tips guys, just going to give instapaper a go. Means I could read tweets from the e71 and just do a grab with instapaper off the ipod touch later.