I had also chance to play briefly with Lumia 800, the first Windows Phone 7 device from Nokia. It had essentially the same design as N9 but slightly smaller screen and no front facing camera.
WP7 OS was buttery smooth and there were no sign of software quirks which are sometimes an issue with Meego OS. However Lumia 800 does feel more like an another Windows Phone rather than something refreshingly new as N9.
I hope Nokia keeps providing support and bug fixes for N9 which seems to be even developing a small fan base. There are definitely people who are looking for something bit different in the world of Androids and Apples, and N9 is an attractive candidate.
I encourage to watch at least the first 10-15 mins of the presentation (then the marketing speech takes over).
I agree on the thoughts of Marko Ahtisaari how touch screen mobile devices are still (on average) somewhat awkward to use. In my opinion closest cousin to N9’s UX is WebOS. Although doomed to walk in the shadow of Android and iOS, N9’s Meego Harmattan and WebOS are both representing the 2nd iteration of touch screen UX design. It is sad that the future of these OSes looks very murky.
But I think it’s a fundamentally flawed idea for Microsoft to build their next-generation OS and interface on top of the existing Windows. The idea is that you get the new stuff right alongside Windows as we know it. Microsoft is obviously trying to learn from Apple, but they clearly don’t understand why the iPad runs iOS, and not Mac OS X.
So instead of expanding Windows Phone 7 OS to also support tablets/slates, Microsoft slaps new GUI layer on top of bulky desktop Windows OS. I am not sure if this is a smart move…
I recently became a huge fan of Markdown. It’s “a text-to-HTML conversion tool” designed for web writers (and casual amateur bloggers :).
Tumbler blogging engine which I’m using for Kutomo has even native support for Markdown syntax.
I’ll try to post more about Markdown and related writing tools shortly but if you do web writing regularly, just try it. I think you gonna love it too.
The above video has been circling in tech blogs lately and some are even praising how this should be “The Way” to do multi-tasking in iOS.
Nice (and very Mac-ish) concept but I doubt it’s usefulness.
Biggest issue with the UI in question is the difficulty to identify apps from their exposé type thumbnails. In iOS we’ve learned to recognize apps by their icon. When we download an app from AppStore the first thing we learn is the icon. When we launch the app from iOS home screen we search for the app’s icon.
iOS apps also tend to be mainly about the content. Many apps have no or very little recognizable UI chrome. Providing random (and tiny) thumbnail screenshot does not necessarily make it easy to identify the app.
Maybe there are better ways to do multi-tasking than the current iOS implementation, but this isn’t it.
As a former owner of iPad I have couple of wishes for the next version:
Lighter weight. When reading books/comics for a longer time especially in a bed the weight can really become an issue with the current model. Come on, I can afford either iPad or a gym card, not both.
FaceTime! FaceTime!! FACETIME!!
Higher resolution display.
I am quite sure we will see 1 & 2 happening with the next version. Increasing the resolution however might be trickier than it sounds since iOS doesn’t seem to scale very easily. For example iPhone 4 has exactly 2x the resolution of previous model and this made scaling of the UI much more easier to accomplish. Similar jump in resolution is unfortunately not very likely in iPad’s case.
Hopefully all the mysteries will be revealed in early Spring.
PS. Yes, I am attempting to update this blog more often from now on.
