User Interface? What's that?


(Couldn't help myself..)

Does someone really think that average consumer understands that because of multitasking UIs fluidity might not be on same level as on competitors products? Do people even recognize true multitasking? Do they appreciate it so much that they will not demand so much from UI speed? I doubt.

btw. Even single tasking is sometimes bit jerky (low fps on animations, animation stutters, slow rotation, kinetic scrolling in photo/albums) :|

Actually what Apple has made is quite clever. They can probably add true multitasking to their product at anytime. Has anyone really thought about that?

.edit
Had to add. That if you got slow UI then please try to remove widgets and reboot phone and see if it makes it faster.

My understanding is that the transitions & beauty are a 2 part effect on the iphone.

1 being that I have heard UI and interaction designers drive what the software engineers produce. So an application is drawn up from the UI, then coded to meet those needs. The UI is the primary consideration, not the functionality and that is why many apple programs lack "advanced" functionality, in an effort not to confuse grandma.

2. the transitions hide lag on the phone. For instance, a screen rotation does take computing power, and rather than just change screens a la s60, the transition makes the change appear graceful whilst hiding that the phone is processing the change.

3 Also, Jobs personally signs off on every product. Apple is his company and his personality and demands are legandary. I don't think Nokia has this personality to drive innovation in the entire company.

Realistically, what company would have 3 mobile OSs, 1 based on the Linux Kernel and decide it was a great time to come out with a Windows-based netbook? Looking at what other major players (Apple, Google, MS) are doing it is similar to Nokia. Apple has a full build of OSX on their Iphones & Ipod touches, Google developed Android & Chrome and is integrating them with their strong suit of online servies, MS is using .NET to simplify development across platforms.

Nokia has Trolltech & QT, but I think they were about 3 years late with that one. If the N900 beat the iPhone to market, we would probably be talking about Maemo as a major player. Instead, 3 years later, Maemo gets folded into Intel's moblin because it's so shitty from a development aspect. (Which will enrage some on here). But I can fire up Xcode on my Mac or Visual Studio (Student Edition) on a PC and be monkeying around in a few minutes. Android also has a nice toolkit. (I'm a beginner though, so I just like to play around and see if I can get something to load, or create a tiny app that can take care of a few boring regular tasks)

My experience with Maemo led me to give up before getting to "Hello World". I want to like Nokia. But in the US they suck, period. Intel will help them gain US visibility, but at what cost? Losing ARM chips in their phones most likely...don't think that's a great move.

Anyway sorry for the digression, but in a nutshell, I would say Apple has better designers and better QA. They stake their claim on the design of a product. Nokia based their claim on the hardware and "ol' reliable" S60. Womp womp.

Is it really the power which causes the UI feel not smooth?

I also had some more or less high end gaming PCs where I wondered why the GUI feels really slow and I can't believe that it was missing power that made me feel like this.

I also guess that the graphic stack of the iPhone is much simpler than X11+GTK+Clutter or X11+QT.
This is a true challenge to make a complete desktop Linux graphic stack running smoothly on a device like the N900... As it is not really optimized for.
Many embedded Linux devices simply use a framebuffer rendering stack which is much simpler.
We are clearly paying our Linux desktop app compatibility with lower graphic performance on the N900

It works but it's not nearly as good as the N900 (I just switched from the iPhone 3GS). You also have to remember that the iPhone OS has already been developed for more than 3 years!

A trade-off I'll make, happily

Actually, I don't think it would.

I'm guessing if you put Maemo5 on iPhone 3GS hardware, it would still stutter there.

But I wouldn't be surprised if N900's task switching gets optimized to get super smooth one day without any hardware changes.

will Maemo 6 / Meego support multicore Arm A9 ?. Symbian 3 supports it already.

I do not understand this point of view here. Also when people talk about apps then someone shows again this card.

I just doubt that people saying this do not really understand how customers behave.

I would like to say to people who like to remember us about how long it took from competitor x to be on level y that think yourselves in boots of salesman who tries to sell N900. Think how that sentence would sound then? Just horrible :|