In this weekend's Yawn!Youtube! post the topic is Mobile OS. Now Mobile OS' themselves are getting quite muddy lately with Manufacturers and Operators overlaying the OS with their own custom UI, much like HTC and Sony Ericsson did with the Hero and X10 and Orange does with some of their handset's home screens.
So ignoring that and concentrating solely on the bare OS provided, who has the most impressive OS overall, and what's the future hold for Mobile OS' in general? Will we be seeing more custom UIs being developed for OS' and making the UX more linear so the user can't tell the differences between different OS? Much like HTCs Hero (which runs on Android) and HD2 (which runs on Windows Mobile.) The user would get more or less the same experience (from UI point of view) and thus upgrading or changing handsets shouldn't cause the user to adapt to a new UI.
Below are videos of the "naked" OS' from Apple, Nokia, Google, and Microsoft respectively;
iPhone 3GS Guided Tour
by mixerX
S60 Touch UI
by S60online
Android 2.0 Official Video
by androiddevelopers
Windows Mobile 6.5 on the T-Mobile Shadow
by pocketnowvideo
Looking at those videos, it's clear to see they all have a very distinctive and different approach to the UI of their Mobile OS. The interesting point to note here is there is only one OS which was designed to compliment the hardware it would be running on, Apple's iPhone. The rest would be on many different handsets with varying features, so customising the look of the OS could be beneficial to both the manufacturer and the OS parent. Making the UI look and blend with the hardware would give a different impression. Customising UI to match hardware may work to the advantage of a particular handset manufacturer if they could keep it linear, thus making the user constantly stick with a familiar UI and purchase their products.
The same could be said for an OS' UI which isn't favourable is outdated and needs a revamp, a minor UI facelift could enhance the appeal of the OS - much like Sony Ericsson and Samsung have done with Nokia's Symbian S60 5th edition with the Satio and OmniaHD respectively.
What will the future of Mobile OS be? Who will control how it looks? With the trend of open sourcing OS to manufacturers will we be seeing more variants of the same OS and how far will customising go? Will the open source Mobile OS become much like Linux, one too many different variant which eventually ends up confusing the majority and eventually one Mobile OS to rule them all becomes the de-facto in the industry? And will that be Maemo;
That ends this weekends video selection for Yawn! Youtube! Come back next weekend for hopefully more videos.
As usual, if you have video you would like included in next weeks post, just use the e-mail at the bottom of the page or find me on Twitter.
3 comments:
You touched on some good points, but the real deal isn't the actual OS UI, but the UI of the apps as well. This is why I think Nokia, with Qt, has set itself up for a raving success over the next ten years. If the OSes run the same apps, OS means little. Just give me common app frameworks, and let me run the apps I want on whatever OS I wish.
The main problem for Nokia is the OVI store, they are hedging their bets on it being a success, but until they learnt to streamline it and make it very simple for users to discover and download apps, it won't matter how great Qt or the UI of the apps are.
Both Appstore and Marketplace are a great example of how to run an app store, OVI jus doesn't cut it.
You touched on some good points, but the real deal isn't the actual OS UI, but the UI of the apps as well. This is why I think Nokia, with Qt, has set itself up for a raving success over the next ten years. If the OSes run the same apps, OS means little. Just give me common app frameworks, and let me run the apps I want on whatever OS I wish.
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