I took delivery of a slightly used Nokia N9 today. I believe this is not available in the US, so some may not even know what it is, but here's a useful page with lots of links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N9This phone represents a departure from both the iPhone and Android. I think it is the incarnation of a design vision in a "pure" kind of way that you really don't see all that often. Last time I thought that was when I bought the first version of the MacBook Air. Unfortunately, the Meego operating system it runs was pronounced dead by Nokia before they even announced the first and apparently last phone to ever run it. I seem to have a bit of an affinity for brilliant evolutionary technological dead-ends, like my Fujifilm S5Pro DSLR.
I'm starting to think phones (and tablets, I suppose, please kill me if I ever buy one) are where all that UI research in the 90's when I was reading about it is bearing fruit. Personal computers were just too entrenched in WIMP, or maybe they're just the wrong platform anyway.
2.x years ago when I bought an iPhone 3Gs, I was thrilled with it. But it's really looking pretty old hat by now. At present, we have the latest Android, the N9, and the iPhone in the house (the hardware on the last is "old" but it is running the latest version of iOS). I thought it might be interesting to look at them from a UI perspective.
(To be continued...)
