Nokia shows off the future look of Symbian, coming in 2011

Filed under: OS Updates, Symbian, Mobile

While the iPhone and Android OS are known for their gorgeous UI candy, Nokia's Symbian OS isn't going to win any beauty contests. Nokia is hard at work on something much, much more attractive for Symbian^4. The mobile company has released its UI concept proposal documents, including some sexy screenshots of the new Orbit and Direct UI landing pages.

The screenshots are the main event, but there's some juicy stuff buried in the design document as well. Most exciting? Symbian^4's application chrome will support transparency, which could lead to some nice-looking effects. As far as usability, Symbian has taken a look at what other mobile OSs are doing, and taken its own path instead:

"iPhone has a flattened application library; however, it is displayed to the user exclusively as a manually organized grid, whereas the Symbian Foundation application library is an alpha-ordered list with multiple filtered views."

Unfortunately, this is only a version 0.1 design document, so Symbian users aren't likely to have the new OS in their hands until 2011. On the other hand, it'll surely undergo plenty of improvements before that time.

[via Engadget]

Nokia shows off the future look of Symbian, coming in 2011 originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 15 Jan 2010 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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