[offtopic]
Did you know about this:
http://www.officelabs.com/projects/s...s/default.aspx

.edit
In my opinion spotlight/launchy/start (search) whatever you wanna call it should be default program/extension/addon in every single program/OS including maemo 5.

ì use launchy alot. funny thing i was just about to ask is there a similar feature or program for the n900

The title should be changed to "A basic usability test on the web browser on ten phones"

Would be more interesting to see the user
- receive/make phone call
- play music
- use the GPS to find directions
- send/receieve email

The outcome would be different for sure

Still... after one hour, you can not know if you like the UI or not. You simply can't. Because you haven't used it under every-day, real-world conditions.

Let me take you to a parallel dimension where they have computers pretty much like ours, with keyboard, mouse and a GUI. Only their GUIs consist of nothing but drop down menus. No colorful toolbars, no keyboard shortcuts, only "File > Open | Save | Quit" and "Edit > Cut | Copy | Paste" and the like.

Then 2 companies both announce brand new text editors. They both say their respective applications will have a revolutionary UI and will work completely without drop down menus.

Company A introduces a system that has toolbars as we know them for "Open", "Save", "Search" etc. - Copy and paste are replaced by beautifully animated drap&drop actions...

Company B has a very different solution: They replace the drop down menus with keyboard shortcuts. Ctrl+O for open, Ctrl+S for save, Ctrl+X/C/V for Xut/Copy/Vaste as we know it. Selecting text is not done with the mouse, but with various Shift combinations: Shift and any arrow key selects text character by character. Shift+Ctrl+arrow selects word by word etc.

Both enter the market at the same time and get reviewed by "journalists" and bloggers.

Guess who will get the good reviews for usability? Right. The editor with the toolbar and the drag&drop thing. Why? Because it's what you understand easily and intuitively when you don't spend much time with the application and don't want t read a manual.
Company B will probably get reviews like "it's not enough to read the manual, you have to keep it open while using the application as you will soon forget which combination of keys triggers which action."

Now come back to our dimension again where we're used to having all of these UI elements. Keyboard shortcuts, menus and toolbars. If you do a lot of typing and keep selecting and moving text around, which of those do you use? I'm working in a room with 22 people at the moment, and I hardly ever see them touch the mouse while typing. Its keyboard shurtcuts that rule here.... because for the specific task, when you're already typing, it's much easier and faster to go Shift+Ctrl+arrow left, arrow left, then ctrl+c, alt+tab and finally ctrl+v . Taking your hands off the keyboard, finding the mouse cursor, carefully selecting the words, moving up to the copy-symbol, etc etc, is just slower and totally breaks your workflow.

Of course you need to know the keyboard shortcuts first. There's a learning curve. But after using them for a while, they're just natural and you'll find they're the superior UI concept for this task. None of the fictional "journalists" in our parallel dimension would have noticed that - because none of them invested the time.


So coming back to the topic of this thread:
In order to become somehow relevant, the test should be conducted in a way that allows "B." to take all phones with him to Indonesia and use them all during his whole stay there. Only after getting used to each of them he can really make a judgement about "usability".

benny1967,
Those things are not exclusive to one another. Good example good be smplayer which is quite good frontend for mplayer which is highly configurable for power users. Also vlc is very powerful but yet easy on UIs point of view. I´m afraid that money that shareholders (in this business) crave comes from people who appreciate short sighted usability (at least at first) as you described it. And in the end of day that's all that matters to Nokia and its shareholders.

So usabilitys definition can be complex and depends on people who make research. But it has to be made somehow and this is one way to do it. There is probably no general usability for single computer with different programs and different needs. Some things should be like childs play and some things should take time. But hey at least we have (crippled) bash shell where quite nice things can be made.

Making UI dead easy, but yet powerful, without forgetting keyboard shortcuts (whole point of having hw keyboard) can make everyone happy.