1. Scott Weiss, User Interface Manager of Symbian Foundation has posted an update of the progress for Symbian^4 UI development.

2. From the blog, there’s nothing much to report actually. If you are expecting new screenshots or video of the upcoming Symbian^4 UI cncept, you’ll be disappointed.

3. However, Scott did summarize briefly of the contributions and ideas that have been generated as well as the sheer amount of interest from the community who want to see a better Symbian in the future.

4. It has to be noted that Symbian^4 is still under heavy development and it will be a good year or more from now before we can see the actual product on real hardware.

5. There’s also 2 videos showcasing the same Symbian^4 UI concept that have been circulating on the interwebs for some time. They showed the photo gallery and the homescreen.

6. What do you think?

1. Symbian^4 is not yet ready and they are working hard to bring it feature complete towards the end of this year.

2. Symbian^4 will bring a new DirectUI user interface. A whole new experience of smart mobile operating system.

3. The new UI will stand head to head with other modern smartphone operating system (iPhone, webOS, Android, Maemo).

4. Among Symbian^4 UI featuers are :
- multiple home screens with different wallpapers (also available in Symbian^3)
- context sensitive toolbar
- easy multitasking with task-switcher icon
- more to come!

5. Symbian Foundation will release more information in due course. Meanwhile, you can take a look at The Symbian UI Brainstorm blog for some really cool ideas regarding Symbian UI.

Source : http://twitpic.com/photos/OlyG

2. Ewan mentioned about an application called Gig Finder which is using a different UI from the standard Symbian^1 (S60 5th Edition) UI.

3. For the sake of excitment and testing something new, I installed Gig Finder to take a peek into the so called new Symbian UI elements.

4. Although the application is packaged in SIS, I believe it is a Widget, not a native application.

On the left is Gig Finder, and on the right is the proposed Homescreen UI for Symbian^4

5. Hell yeah! It is indeed different from the stock Symbian^1 user interface which I hate to love it!

6. The UI is modern and has elements of other modern UI in the market. For example, there are 3 icons at the bottom of the screen which is called Toolbar, it is used to access the most accessed (logically) functions.

7. There’s also other elements that will pop out for users to confirm actions. And the pop-up is hanging, i.e. not locked to the bottom of the screen like the existing Symbian^1 UI.

8. For the Options and other menus like Setting of the app, and those that is not accessed frequently, including the Information about the App, the menu is accessible by pressing an icon at the top left corner of the screen.

9. The UI looks good on landscape mode too!

10. The new Symbian^4 UI is not finalised yet. And Symbian just annonounced Symbian^3 as a full open source system. It will be interesting to see what the community will bring to the plate.

11. Bring it on Symbian^4!!!

- Asri al-Baker

2. Frankly, it’s a very cool application and I never ued the built-in Menu / Launcher anymore.

3. A new version, 1.51 has been released and adds the following enhancements :-
- You can add / remove applications
- There’s a new status-bar on top of the screen displaying network signal, date, clock, battery etc
- The taskmanager is improved.
- it is sleeker and faster

4. In the help screen, they mentioned http://www.getvapp.com as the official website but when I visited it, nothing.

5. Overall, I’m very impressed with it.

6. Enjoy these screenshots! (click on them for bigger screenshots)

vMenu Launcher

vMenu Taskmanager

Add and delete applications

Landscape mode

Get it from our DOWNLOAD session.

2. According to a tweet by the Skyfire team, which links to a post at Skyfire Forums by the Community Manager, Dave Burchell, they are looking for serious users of Symbian S60 5th Edition to help them testing the new version.

“We are in the process of building the best Skyfire browser ever. We’ll soon resume alpha testing with new builds for Symbian S60 5th edition and Windows Mobile VGA resolution phones. We are looking for a small number of informed and avid mobile phone users to help us refine and improve the browser during our alpha test period.

If you have a recent Symbian (e.g., Nokia 5800 or N97) or WinMo touchscreen phone, and are interested in giving frequent feedback on the latest Skyfire browser builds as they are made available for testing, then please send an email to alpha@skyfire.com for additional information.”

3. If you have what it takes, do give them your hand.

4. To use Skyfire, go to http://get.skyfire.com using your S60 3rd Edition smartphones and download the software.

5. It uses server-rendering technology where websites are compressed before sent to your phones.

2. Bear in mind that this is NOT the final or official Symbian UI developed by Symbian Foundation that uses Qt. This is just a concept from developers.

3. The company developing this concept is Tieto. They also attended SEE09 to demonstrate their techonologies.

4. The concept UI is running on an existing S60 5th Edition (Symbian ^1) smartphone.

5. Lets hope more goodies will be made available for Symbian

2. Just in case that you are wondering, the Release Council is formed by representatives of the following member companies: Samsung, Nokia, Texas Instruments, ST Ericsson, Sony Ericsson, DoCoMo, Fujitsu, Digia, Elektrobit and Teleca – and soon to join is Qualcomm IC.

3. Week44 update

We are currently working with 3 releases:Symbian^2 which is in hardening, Symbian^3 which is open for feature submission and Symbian^4 which we are currently roadmapping.

4. S^2 Update

This Release is in Hardening, which means that features are no longer integrated and the focus is on bug fixes. We have published a feature spec for Symbian^2 and now the basaeline pdk2.0.0 is available for download. Also, we are currently in the process of ratifying the API baseline for S^2.

5. S^3 Update

This Release is now open for Feature Submission ( Release Start was approved in week44). PDK3.0.b now available (w43), although is currently currently textshell only as we are expecting a New Graphics Architecture(NGA) to be contributed shortly. The PDK3.0.b includes a new 3 plain comms architecture and support for writeable demand paging.

Zoom2 is the reference hardware for Symbian^3, and the baseport is now available for download.

Going forward

The plan is to keep the information fresh every month, reflecting the outcome of the council meetings and the work done by the Symbian team. So keep listening for more updates!

2. Qt (“CUTE”) is a multi-platform application and development framework that is rapidly developed to be the framework for Symbian OS in the future.

3. Qt will replace the current AVKON framework that is powering S60.

4. Qt will be fully integrated into Symbian OS somewhere around early 2011 in Symbian ^4.

5. More information at Qt official blog.