User Interface (UI) has been the Achilles’ heel of Symbian OS. Sure, Symbian is powerful and gets the job done, but it isn’t intuitive by any means. The Symbian OS UI appears to be unnecessarily complex and disorganized when compared with the likes of iPhone and Android.
Nokia knows this and is working on making future versions of Symbian more intuitive. It is expected to showcase Symbian^3 at the Mobile World Congress (to be held next month), and has already begun working on Symbian^4. However, Symbian^4 won’t be here until late 2009 or early 2010.
Symbian^4 will be implementing the Direct UI paradigm which supports touch and hybrid devices. Moreover, Symbian S60 applications will be re-written using Orbit widgets and QT APIs.
Currently, Symbian^4 UI elements are merely at the proposal stage. The final release may differ significantly from the concept interface demonstrated in the screenshots.
