14 DAY TRIAL // According to the latest news on the Internet, Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia is getting ready to come to the market with a new face for its Symbian S60 5th Edition-based mobile devices. The move won't happen in the near future, it seems, but it will be made soon enough, with the first handset to sport it expected to come to the market sometime at the end of next year.
What lies behind this move seems to be the fact that the S60 5th edition as we know it at the moment, and which is called “Avkon,” is stated to be only a temporary solution, which is to be replaced in the future, at least this is what Scott Weiss, user interface technology manager for The Symbian Foundation, is reported to have said recently.
Current touchscreen handsets from the world's largest mobile phone maker, including the popular N97 or the 5800 XpressMusic, come with Avkon, yet things are about to change. Krzysztof Choma, former senior software engineer at Nokia, and a senior software engineer for Symbian for 2 years, also says that the UI will soon be replaced with a new one, called Direct UI.
Stefan Constantinescu from IntoMobile says that there will be two things added to Symbian^4, which should be completed by this time next year, and that these things are a new “Orbit” extension library for Qt, which should include over 50 widgets aimed at the mobile user experience, a replacement for the current “Avkon” widget set, and a new “Direct UI” interaction and navigation logic, which should bring finger-optimized layouts for excellent touch and hybrid-device user experience.
For the time being, it seems that nothing has been decided in what Avkon's fate is concerned, due to several cons and pros. On the one hand, the UI is rather old, and it seems unable to compete against the more attractive solutions available on the market at the moment, while on the other hand, developers will be forced to rewrite their applications.
For what it's worth, the sooner the new UI will come to the market, the better for Symbian users, yet the odds are that the move will be made later rather than sooner. In case the upcoming Symbian^4 will be ready by mid-2010, and if it comes with a new UI, we will probably see it available on the market in late 2010 or, most probably, in 2011.