Nokia has submitted its Symbian^4 user interface proposal to the Symbian Foundation, proposing to simplify the S60 user experience by means of renewed layouts, context menu support for list items, guidelines for autosaving content and minimizing user prompts, among other upgrades. "This proposal improves the competitiveness of the Foundation Platform by reorganizing and clarifying the feature richness of the software to improve access to and use of richly interconnected applications," writes Nokia head of user experience Elizabeth Dykstra-Erickson, the author of the S^4 User Interface Concept Proposal, who goes on to compare the UI design solution to rival operating systems:
- "HTC Hero and Motorola Droid, both on Android, have a Homescreen with movable Homescreen widgets; however, each has one multi-panel homesceen page, whereas Symbian Foundation has independent unique pages
- "Palm Pre's WebOS eliminates Exit commands, but instead of saving state and releasing memory it keeps applications running
- "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."
The Nokia proposal is available for download now on the Symbian Developer Community forum, which also calls for questions, comments, suggestions and requests related to the document.
For more on the Symbian^4 proposal:
- visit the Symbian Developer Community forum
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