Symbian's UI vision dies - the second time

Andrew Orlowski has written a very interesting two part history of Symbian, from the start until today. In the second part there is talk about UI. Around 2000 Symbian was an independent company, based in England. It had just announced the new OS and had many influental customers for it, such as Nokia, Motorola and Ericksson. They were all very excited by the new OS and were eager to put it in their devices.

Symbian's goal was to develop a bunch of UI reference designs that their customers could use. However, only over few years, the progress on UI reference designs slowed down and ceased to exist because of fighting between the before mentioned influential big companies. They didn't like the reference desings, or they didn't want that Symbian would develop reference designs altogether. Finally Nokia introduced it's own Series60 UI (that it had developed in secret) and practically killed Symbian's own reference UI designs. Another one to survive was UIQ on Ericksson.

Fast forward to 2010. Symbian was open source and Symbian^4 was under preparation. It was supposed to have a completely redesigned UI, designed by the open source project. Symbian owned the UI again. Although Nokia was financing most of the development, in theory other Symbian OS customers could influence the design. Yet before the year became to end, Nokia announced that Symbian OS becomes closed source, and that the development of Symbian^4 stops.

Instead, the current Symbian^3 UI, that is based on Nokia's old Series60 UI, will receive incremental updates over coming years. Nokia could not take a risk abandoning it's 10 year old Series60 UI. On the other hand, Symbian^4 UI may not have made any difference in market place anyway (it would have been less attractive than Android, iOS and others), and just caused a lot of pain to Symbian application developers.

At the moment, the UI future of Symbian is murky at best. It is completely in Nokia's hands when they improve the UI and how. There is no public roadmap for it. You just have to have trust in Nokia that they can make Symbian user experience great. Do you have that trust?

This all is completely opposite to Android, where Google has a strong vision to Android UI and all the customers seem to accept it. They are allowed to tweak the UI if they wish, but so far it has been minimal. It shows that Google knows what they are doing. They have a bunch of talented programmers that can improve the Android UI in fast pace, and re-resign it if needed.