1. There’s no “WOW” Symbian device announced during MWC 2010 2 weeks ago. Well, in my opinion, this year’s MWC is flat, nothing exciting for a Symbian enthusiast. Well. the Vivaz Pro was just a Vivaz with QWERTY… nothing new…
2. While other companies such as Microsoft, unveiled new and cool user interface technology, Symbian users are presented with this video, showing the new Symbian^3 which enhances user experience by eliminating legacy double-tapping, easier connection manager and hardware acceleration. In other words, faaasssttt…
3. In this video, if you look carefully, you will find some new elements of Symbian^3 which are not available in previous Symbian versions such as :
- multiple homescreens with indicators
- when viewing homescreen in landscape, the soft-keys are located at the bottom, not at the side
- Kinetic scrolling at 60 frame per second everywhere
- new music player interface (which reminds me of iPhone’s music player a lot!)
- multi-touch interface (again, reminiscing iPhone)
- visual taskmanager which looks kinda like Palm’s webOS’ taskmanager
4. However, it is still looks like the S60 5th Edition UI aka Symbian^1 which has been around for more than a year now.
5. Yeah, I Know, the Foundation is working hard on the next Symbian releae aka Symbian^4 which will use a new UI but until this time next year 2011, we will have to wait and use this “tired and old-looking UI“.
6. I have shown the video above to many friends, Blackberry and iPhone users and their reactions are as expected. Comments like “Symbian is trying to copy other UIs and it has nothing new”
7. Personally, I’m pumped to see the Symbian^3 UI on a real hardware and the manufacturers like Nokia have committed to bring new Symbian^3 devices by the middle of this year 2010.
8. But at the same time, I am also concerned about a few things that are not revealed in the video (or anywhere else?). Mainly the following :
- text entry : will it still use the stupid full screen text entry editor that I really hate? the one that needs me to click a green tick icon on the top left everytime I finished entering texts? why dont they just implement a useful soft QWERTY like on the iPhone or Android?
- battery/power consumption : with hardware acceleration, capacitive screen and more, I’m worried about the power consumption. Will the new Symbian^3 devices utilise power intelligently and can stand my heavy usage pattern? I mean, it’s pointless if it has the latest and greatest but can stand only a few hours in real life usage…
- RAM management : On paper, Symbian is RAM efficient but manufacturers decided to be stingy and put minimal amount of physical RAM inside Symbian smartphones which limit the devices’ potential. The epic failure of N97 classic for example, is a testimony of how a great device is weakend by the limited amount of RAM.
- Internet browser / Web : The Webkit-based internet browser, is nice but it’s far behind Apple’s and Google’s implementation of Webkit on their mobile devices. It’s slow, doesnt render pages correctly and hard to use. Will Symbian^3 come with a new web-browser that doesnt suck? Or do we still have to rely on 3rd party applications such as Opera Mobile 10?
9. Those are my main concerns regarding Symbian^3 and I have no idea what to expect.
10. If the enhancements in Symbian^3 are about what are shown in the video above, then I’m disappointed because I feel, by looking at it, this should be Symbian^1 since the very beginning when Symbian Foundation took over. This shouldn’t be Symbian^3…
- Asri al-Baker