[geeks] Nokia is getting the Rick Belluzzo treatment...

[Jonathan Groll]

On Thu, 2 Jun 2011 10:22:26 -0500 (CDT), Jonathan Patschke <jp at celestrion.net> wrote:
> I fail to believe that Nokia's abrupt change in UI direction was
> necessary.  Yes, the iPhone is a very nice product, but it's not something
> that's as usable for me as my Nokia.  Surely there's room at the top for
> something that looks nothing like an iPhone, yet that's nearly all that's
> being built.

Agreed, although such a device would surely not be an S60 device.
Isn't that the whole Symbian problem - very large code base and poor
integration between components as a consequence, so that the UI
experience is poor. Take for instance address book integration with
the dialler, how many key presses is it to phone "John Smith" on a
recent S60 release?

> The industry's attempts to clone the iPhone look a lot like GNOME and
> KDE's attempts to clone the Windows UI for the last 15 years: clumsy.  The
> dialpad/shoulder-button model worked really well, even if you couldn't
> play "Angry Birds" on it.  All these other phone GUIs, apart from not
> being what I want, have the feel of being put together by people who
> recognize gee-whiz, but have no firm grasp of what makes a system usable
> day-by-day.

Except for Android! Having owned an Android phone, I think it fair to
say that it doesn't have a clumsy UI and that Google do know how to
build good user interfaces. Now, I've never owned or used an Android
tablet, not sure if it is as refined there.

> That, plus the iPhone's influence pollution the Mac development ecosystem
> (Mac App Store, the nutty "Back to the Mac" features in OS X 10.7) makes
> me rather sad that I'm as invested as I am in the Mac as a workstation
> platform for me.

Similarly, Unity is "polluting" the Ubuntu desktop, both with netbook
features and with an embarrassingly "mac" way of doing things!

Cheers,
Jonathan
--
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