Series 40 and Series 60 converging

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Our test-lab just got a Series 40 Edition 5 Feature pack 1 phone, the Nokia 6500 slide, and I had a chance to play around with it.

It used to be that the Series 40 phones was the easy-to-use feature phones and the Series 60 phones was the capable, multitasking but more complex smartphones. After the last couple of software iterations this is no longer so clear cut. You can also check out the Series 40 vs S60 article over at allaboutsymbian.

Smartphone Jr.

The Series 40 is playing catch-up to S60 smartphones like the flagship N95. (Would that be a pennant-ship?) Series 40 has evolved into a "Smartphone Jr." OS, complete with several S60 user interface components not previously seen in Series 40. Nokia has always claimed that Series 60 UI is the most thoroughly user-tested mobile UI in the world. It would be very interesting to know if this is true for the Series 40 Ed5 UI as well.

The Series 40 UI is built from bitmaps and is fairly responsive. The S60 UI is vector based, its built on SVG and that may be one of the reasons why it often feels sluggish. (SVG takes a lot more time to render than bitmaps.)

 

Example of Active Idle, S60 style. The design is heavy handed and not particularly elegant. Series 40 have had Active Idle since 3rd Edition, I believe.

 

Scrolling form with spinners and Save and Cancel buttons.

Ed5 uses spinners quite liberally. Spinners are used to select between items with the left/right arrow keys. The challenge with spinners is that the user sees only the one displayed item, so it have to be obvious what the others are. Spinners works when they are used to increment or decrement a numeric value for example. In Series 40 spinners are also used as binary switches or to select among very different items. It looks like spinners now basically replaces the previous popup lists. I prefer popup lists 90% of the time.

 

Unfortunately, with Feature pack 1, tabs are now a part of Series 40. Tabs are a very useful interface metaphor for the UI designer, they always seem to solve a lot of problems. But tabs are notoriously hard to use and understand for the user.

This particular use of tabs in the download section are just broken. They come and go as you select and they make little attempt to follow the tabs metaphor.

 

Part of the XpressMusic player. The visual style is quite different in some parts of the UI. Even the menus have variations.

 

Series 40 now has a 2-level three view. (I'm skeptical to three views, but I'm not going to whine about that now.) For a three view it works ok, but this one needs a much better visualization of the hierarchy in my opinion.

The Spinners, the Tabs and the Three view are all attempts to decrease the depth of the user interface. More information is visible at the top level.

 

Comments

[George]

Hi
I'm a nokia 3120 classic user. it comes also with series 40 5th edition feature pack 1. i'd like to know how to enable the "tab view" and "active idle". can you please help me?
greets george