Symbian welcomes Nokia's input

FINNISH PHONE FIRM Nokia has put forward proposals for its next Symbian operating system framework, saying that it hopes to play a significant role in the development of the platform.

Writing on the Symbian blog, Effie Vraka, Symbian's technology specialist for multimedia applications said, "The proposals will undergo open evaluation and critique." Vraka added, "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."

Vraka said that Nokia's proposal included a list of possible features, as well as screenshots, adding that they "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."

The shots show a nice looking phone that rather noticably includes the battery and signal information where you would normally find message alerts and the like. There does not appear to be much room for other icons, so we assume that it is here that we will see the benefits of customisation and changes to the user interface.

Vraka clearly loves it. "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," he said.

He added that what pleased him most was the firm's decision to release its proposals so early on. "By publicising 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."

Open indeed, then. µ