Diaries of a Nokia Fan Boy

Ok, so Windows Mobile 7 (WinMo7) doesn’t have a heck of a lot to do with Nokia. I could push that its because its Microsoft, and they are now working together, but that would be crap and you would know it. Really the main purpose for my covering this is I’m interested in the UI. I always thought that WinMo had a very outdated UI, and was always wondering why they don’t just redesign it, I mean they have the money for it. Of course help came with the shell updates from companies like HTC with WinMo 6.x, but those were just surface changes. We can actually see a mirror image of that happening with the touchscreen Symbian 5, in that the new version of the software looks kind of like a mask, with the insides still being glitchy and not user friendly by today’s standards.

Well the really exciting part is that Microsoft is actually doing something about it with WinMo7, or so we hope anyway. So that’s why I was quite excited to review the screenshots.

Ok, so the first screenshot is the calendar. Well some good, some bad – the interface is certainly more appealing, however having the time bar at the top would have been useful, but they removed that; and judging by “Pivot Left” and “Pivot Right” buttons on the screen, it would appear that gestures won’t be supported (and if they are then they’re wasting space).

The second, in-call, screenshot seems to be fairly basic, but is done fairly well – no complaints really.

Thirdly, the address book / contacts list (whatever you want to call it) certainly looks appealing, and I’m just hoping that they left the long-press menu option available and will use it to instantly call, create message or email the person.

Calendar

In-Call

Contacts

Inbox, the fourth screenshot, is virtually identical to the contacts list – if the long-press menu’s are there, then we’re good. Of course here some other gestures would be nice too.

The toggle switches and slider bars are certainly an improvement over the checkboxes, but we have to see how they actually implement those in actual menus, since screenshot five is just a sample.

The sixth screenshot, the text message, I have a small gripe with. Its always annoyed me when I have to close what I’m typing just to check on a consecutive message that came in from somebody. Which is why I like the threaded views so much. However, what’s the point of a threaded view if you can’t even see the message above? The keyboard takes up the entire screen and I would say its entirely unnecessary.

Inbox

Switches

Message Composer

Overall, the screenshots are an improvement, but a rather small one at best. There are a lot of things that we have to look at, such as menu structure, in order to find out if its actually going to be any good. And unfortunately, I’m already disappointed with it: there is absolutely no reason why the context menus have to be on there. Its things like that that make me very cautious over Symbian’s progress, however since Symbian is going open source, hopefully we’ll see user-compiled versions with some nice improvements. That is, of course, if Nokia allows users to reinstall the operating system like HTC does at the moment.

PS: if you notice all the screenshots are different, non-standard, dimensions – this tells me that they either didn’t have a very good design structure or made it all to be very scalable. And guess which one I think is the case?

-Nokia FanBoy

via: GSMArena.com (read)