Symbian Blog: Design Category

From user interface design to asethetics, Symbian bloggers discuss the value of how things appear.

New Symbian^2 device – Raku-Raku Phone 7 released by NTT DOCOMO

The Raku-Raku Phone 7, manufactured by Fujitsu and based on Symbian^2, is now available in Japan in all NTT DOCOMO stores.

The main feature of the Raku-Raku (meaning “easy-to-use” in Japanese) Phone 7 is the ease with which you can connect to the Raku-Raku iMenu by simply pressing the newly added “Raku-Raku Site Button”. Fun and useful information about the weather, news, train routes, share prices and fortune-telling is available via the Raku-Raku iMenu and they can all be accessed quickly. It’s now possible to create Deco-mail (decorated mail messages) too.

The new phone inherits the popular waterproof and dust-proof features from the Raku-Raku Phone 6. Other services include iConcier, an application that delivers and displays information tailored to the individual user and makes life easier, and i Bodymo, which helps you stay healthy whilst you simply enjoy the applications of “Walking” and “Eating”. In addition, Walking Clinic by Naoko Takahashi is an application in which Ms Naoko Takahashi (Japan’s Olympic gold medalist and former marathon runner) advises you on how to walk correctly by diagnosing the way you walk. As you can see, the device is full of attractive functions and is even easier to use.

The model comes in four body colours of gold, dark silver, pink and red. You can find more information in Fujitsu’s press release.

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Nokia To Contribute Multimedia Adaptation Code

Jul 9th by Jeremy Murray-Wakefield

Creating the adaptation software to get audio working on a prototype mobile device has always been a major coding effort. What if a diary alarm goes off whilst you are in the middle of a telephone call? What audio notification is acceptable when an incoming message arrives whilst you’re listening to music? Should the music fade down, or be put on pause? These are not only difficult design decisions, but fiendishly difficult to code and test.

The A3F framework in Symbian^3 eases physical audio adaptation, but it isn’t responsible for either the monitoring or the routing of audio signals. In recognition of this, Nokia is open-sourcing its Audio Policy Framework and Audio Graph Manager, and contributing them to the Symbian Foundation. The Policy Framework allows system designers to plug in “Rule Books” that define the system behaviour, and Nokia’s advanced Audio Graph Manager configures the system according to those rules. Both of these components are based around the production code from actual Nokia devices. Read more »

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docomo STYLE series™ SH-02B marimekko is now on sale

Jul 2nd by Michiko Nagai

A new Symbian handset, the docomo STYLE series™ SH-02B marimekko from NTT docomo, is on sale from today in Japan.

The SH-02B marimekko, which is manufactured by Sharp, is a stylish phone featuring vivid colors, designed in collaboration with popular Finnish brand marimekko. Its camera is CCD with face-detection autofocus, and the effective resolution is 8.0 megapixels. Video transfer from Blu-ray Disc recorders is capable, and it comes in UNIKKO red, UNIKKO blue, and UNIKKO black. The handset is available at NTT docomo’s distributors.

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Monotype Imaging Contributes Chinese Font to Symbian Foundation

Jun 9th by Scott Weiss

Fonts are one of the areas of intellectual property that often come up at the last minute in device creation. Before fonts, many device creators think of icons, input methods, interaction paradigms, and the relationship between sensors and the user experience (UX), rather than something as “simple” as a font. However, fonts offer a fundamental opportunity to add beauty to a user interface, as they’re used in just about every part of the on-screen experience. They tend to be more detailed and more rigorously designed than most icons, but we tend to not notice a great font as we might a lovely wallpaper or theme. On the other hand, an unattractive font is one of the first areas of a design that would receive criticism–so it’s critical to select an attractive, easy to read typeface. Read more »

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UI Council Face-to-Face

Jun 4th by Scott Weiss

A couple of weeks ago, on the 18th & 19th May, all the Symbian councils held a series of face-to-face meetings in Symbian’s London office. They were all well attended, some great discussions were had and good progress was made. Kazuyuki Sato, the UI Council attendee from Fujitsu, was kind enough to provide us with some feedback about the meeting and the council in general which we thought we’d share.

When asked what he most enjoyed talking about at the meeting he responded that, “the discussion regarding the Social Mobile Framework competition was a definite highlight”. He’s referring to the soon-to-be announced competition that will reward the best implementation and design of seamless social networking applications for Symbian. More details from that discussion can be found in the minutes from the UIC meeting. Read more »

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NTT DOCOMO releases S^2 devices

Jun 1st by Kyoko Horikawa

docomo STYLE series F-07B

NTT DOCOMO recently announced its lineup of 20 new handsets, 4 of which are based on the Symbian^2 platform. The new models based on the Symbian^2 platform are the docomo PRIME series™ F-06B, docomo STYLE series™ F-07B and docomo STYLE series F-08B manufactured by Fujitsu and the docomo PRIME series SH-07B manufactured by Sharp. The docomo STYLE series F-07B is the world’s first device based on the Symbian^2 platform in the marketplace, which shipped in Japan on May 21st. And the docomo PRIME series SH-07B has been available from May 28th. Read more »

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April UI Workshop in London

May 6th by Scott Weiss

Symbian hosted a UI Workshop on the 26th of April in Central London. It was an opportunity for designers, developers, marketers, and managers representing software developers, service providers, agencies, manufacturers, and operators (among others) to come together with a common goal: to improve the Symbian platform through brilliant ideas and collaboration. This workshop had a special emphasis on Symbian^4:

Deconstructing the Symbian^4 UI and understanding S^4 UI patterns
Theming the Symbian platform (differentiation in S^4 for device creators)
Designing with the Symbian Social Mobile Framework (SMF)
Application UI design for S^4
Brainstorming how to push the UI forward — thinking about S^5 and beyond — and unique handset customisation opportunities

Objectives

Raise awareness of Symbian and the open source effort for its user interface
Invite respected community members to collaborate on improvements to the UI
Educate the community about rapid UI brainstorming methods by doing it together
Form helpful business relationships, both for Symbian’s UI and between workshop delegates

The workshop reception was generously sponsored by Design for Mobile, KeyPoint Technologies, and Sharp. Read more »

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Symbian^4 User Interface Update

Mar 25th by Scott Weiss

The Symbian^4 User Interface UI concept proposal generated an astounding amount of interest. Enrique Gallar, a Principal Designer in User Experience at Nokia coded Wordle.net and Yahoo! Pipes, along with the input from Symbian Foundation’s developer forums, blog responses, and popular Symbian blogs to generate the word cloud above to this paragraph. Please read this posting through to the end, where two lovely videos demonstrating S^4 are linked.

It’s telling that the largest word on the cloud is “want,” which can mean that the Symbian community wants Symbian^4, or they want even more. Both answers are great: firstly, the proposal was approved by the UI Council. Secondly, as part of an open source effort, we have the opportunity to keep evolving and improving the UI (and the rest of the platform). Read more »

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Symbian^4 UI Concept Proposal

Jan 15th by Effie Vraka

Momentum behind the evolution of the Symbian open eco-system continues to gather pace. Yesterday the Foundation placed its web run time tools into open source. Today Nokia, market leader in mobile devices, put forward proposals for a new framework for Symbian-powered UIs, to the Symbian open community. The proposals will undergo open evaluation and critique.

The UI Concept Proposal for Symbian^4 provides additional details on the Orbit and Direct UI major contribution proposals that are currently being voted by the Symbian Foundation councils.

The document highlights how the Symbian^4 UI will benefit from Nokia’s contribution and will introduce important usability-focused improvements, for example by providing interaction and layout patterns that apply to all applications, for a unified and more consistent user experience.

The proposal also contains a list of features and a number of screenshots that give us a glance of how the UI will benefit from new layouts, user-facing libraries for Contacts, Music, Photos and Applications and many other features that deliver a fresh user interaction: my attention was caught by the proposed removal of a number of prompts to the user, a redesigned control panel and the elimination of tunneling Options commands, which seems to be a great response to what the community has been asking for!

Nokia have clearly focused on providing a highly competitive UI framework proposal that will place the Symbian User Experience into the race with the Android, PalmOS and iPhone.

But, for me, the most positive of all that puts this proposal beyond competition is the open approach they are taking: by publicizing the concept proposal so early so that they get valuable community feedback to take into account for the final proposal, they are taking openness a step beyond just code-openness.

The following screenshots can give you a taste of what has been said so far, but for the full details please review the proposal and let us know what you think!

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Design in the Open: the S^3 Widget Carousel

Dec 16th by Scott Weiss

What you see here is from a YouTube video featuring a Symbian code prototype of a new way to manage and enjoy widgets for Symbian^3. This is the release of the Symbian platform coming to device creators early next year. Click the image to see the video. It was produced using the Symbian emulator.

The prototype, created by Jaakko Haukipuro, the Package Owner for Homescreen, is not a completed design but instead a design concept, for which he would like your input.

The concept has a corresponding page on ideas.symbian.org where you can add your thoughts and vote. You can even add ideas of how to improve the design, which is the primary goal of this posting.

Business Objectives
The existing method for adding and removing items in the widgets is ready for improvement. It is based on menus and lists, while the proposed redesign is drag-and-drop. At the end of this posting is a sequence of graphics that depicts the current method for adding and removing items.

Summary of Changes
1. The widget “tray” is being replaced by a (kinetic) scrollable widget carousel. Flicking left or right within the carousel scrolls to reveal other widget items. A carousel will not scroll if it holds four or fewer items.
2. The call to action to edit the carousel is proposed to be a graphic, currently the small upper-left red box. Clicking that smaller red box causes the widget item palette to appear (and the larger, lower-right red box appears when the palette appears).
3. One can drag items from the palette to the carousel. Items can be dragged from the carousel to the palette, too.
4. Clicking the lower-right red box closes the editing session and hides the palette.

Architecture
In the prototype, the carousel holds the shortcuts to the applications that were installed on the device. Data is managed in and published from each individual plug-in, making it possible to show any kind of item in the carousel. A new plug-in can be introduced to show your favourite contacts, bookmarks, MP3s, you name it.

How it is in Symbian^2
In the current Symbian platform, widget item selection is made via the Options menu, and then through a set of lists of items, as you can see below. The proposed change (above) is direct and drag-and-drop, much more modern, and is likely to be more fun to use. What do you think?