Stephane – I very much agree. I especially liked the way you put the trend where “OEMs are engaged in defining their new ’2.0 interface’”. Your second point deserves an entire article:

“If OEMs want to make a business out of UI personalities, they will need to properly design their UI framework to remain in control of the business value chain.”

I think the smarter UI frameworks (or replacement technologies) will look at having service delivery hooks in as part of the user interface APIs, so that it’s trivial to create advertising inventory or service delivery inventory within the apps and across the user journey..

Andreas

On the technical side, OEMs will have to be cautious on how they expose the UI personalization capabilities to the end-users and developers. Today you can already apply an iPhone theme on a Blackberry or Symbian device for free. If you consider that by 2010 some handsets will probably provide advanced theming capabilities (layout, skin, 2D/3D effects, visual transitions), just add a mash-up capable UI feature (think widgets), and you give pretty much all the technology developers need to create compelling UIs.
If OEMs want to make a business out of UI personalities, they will need to properly design their UI framework to remain in control of the business value chain.

ceo

As you rightly point out we at Adobe had a number of “excursions” into the UI space. Flash Lite is used in the personalisation layer of LG, Samsung, Sony Ericsson and also Nokia S60 and S40 devices. It’s been a huge success for us with the majority of our 922m shipped devices using Flash for UI personalisation.

I hear consistently from our OEM customers that portability of the runtime and availability of developers and designers to create rich engaging mobile experiences is the fundamental sticking point. It’s not enough to create a smart rendering engine, you have to make it usable; you have to understand designers.

You’d be surprised at how many times I’ve sat in front of OEMs demonstrating their full platform mock-up in Flash. One even simulated vibration by jiggling the device skin

I believe that in the future, with a mash-up of technologies and frameworks we’ll finally reach a state where these mock-ups can simply be the real thing.

Nokia bought Qt after all..but can a designer use it?

Mark Doherty
Platform Evangelist – Mobile and Devices
Adobe

Steven – TAT’s Kastor is officially available on S60, so it might be the Kastor engine. Addressing your other very valid points:
- Nokia/Moto/SEMC have built a strong UI paradigm affinity. But then user interaction design (soft keys, menu/action flows, input controls, etc) can remain the same within each OEM’s product lines – while graphics design changes based on diverse Personalities. I would argue that Personalities create differentiation, while user interaction design creates consistency of use.
- Nokia’s Themes is a bottom-up approach to introduce pliability into S60 themes, but it is still a far cry from what can be achieved using UI Frameworks and a top-down architectural redesign.

Andreas

I would feel that Nokia/Moto/SE must continue their UI paradigm, so their loyal users would not get lost in the phone’s menu. this seems to be No.1 reason not to adopt radical UI framework, of course, limited phone resource is another. TouchFlo on HTC is flashy, but costly.

besides, UI paradigm progress on none-touch phones are really limited. no multi-touch , no TouchFlo. and Nokia Theme already doing a good job personalizing UI .

Nonetheless, whilst you point out the technological developments, which we see accelerating with the various UI frameworks now, I think there remains the problem of operator reluctance to stray from conventions that are well known and (LOL) ‘easier’ to support.