ui

Two excellent articles in All About Symbian:

• Ewan Spence questions whether whether Symbian needs a new user interface
• Steve Litchfield goes against the trend that puts the touch screen as the best phone interface.

To this, let me add my two cents worth.

I like my N900 for what seems like the wrong reasons:

• Resistive screen. Possibly because of the I am a Palm veteran, I find I like having a stylus handy, mainly for sketching, but also allowing for higher density applications or checklists.
• Hardware keyboard. Maybe Fat fingers; maybe a history with Psion and the E61; maybe the need to actually see whats on screen without the virtual keyboard hogging all the space.

Apple and Android developers would benefit from those articles. Nokia should pay more attention to them as well. If I understand it correctly, Nokia would benefit from having both MeeGo and Symbian with distinctive hardware and interface.