New Screenshots Of MeeGo UI Show A Lot Of Potential

The mobile OS Nokia and Intel are currently working on

For years on end, Symbian was the most popular mobile operating system in the world. In fact, worldwide, Symbian is still in the lead today. Co-owned by several well-known phone manufacturers like Nokia, Panasonic, Sony Ericsson and Samsung, Symbian was the top choice for top of the line mobile phones, which are today known as smartphones.

All of the previously mentioned companies served lineups of phones consisting of lower-end handsets with regular UIs and higher end products running Symbian. Nowadays, things have changed a bit because of the recent success of several mobile operating systems. Most manufacturers decided to go with Google’s Android (the list includes Motorola, Sony Ericsson, Samsung or HTC). Apple has its own iOS, implemented in products like the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.  Nokia, the Finish manufacturer who used to release Symbian phones like there’s no tomorrow, is now focusing on coming up with an operating system of its own, and promoting it to the point where it could prove a serious competitor for Google and Apple’s offerings. After many years of leading the market, Nokia might just want to maintain its position as well as revenue.

MeeGo, an operating system you may have heard about, was the result of a union between Nokia’s Maemo mobile platform and Intel’s Moblin operating system. It was introduced at Mobile World Congress in February 2010. According to Intel, Meego was created because Microsoft didn’t offer comprehensive Windows 7 support for its Intel Atom processors. The MeeGo project includes several GUIs for different devices such as netbooks, smartphones, tablets and in-vehicle infotainment. Scheduled for an October release, MeeGo 1.1 for handsets seems to bring quite a few interesting features, as revealed by several photos which were posted on My Nokia Blog.

The stock version of Meego is shown in the photos and the user interface could look somewhat different after each manufacturer gets to customize it. But for the most part, this is what you’ll get out of MeeGo as soon as it gets released. The idle lock screen offers all of the information a user could ever need, including clock, date, missed calls, text messages or instant messages. Two lock mechanisms will be available. One of them will allow the user to unlock a device by pulling the lock button towards a square space found right underneath the clock, as seen in the photo below. If you’re not specifically fond of dragging the lock up, you’ll also get to drag and drop the lock from the top of the screen towards the same square area.

While this doesn’t sound bad, few users are very interested in how to unlock a handset. Assuming it’s simple enough and doesn’t confuse them, users will simply adapt to whichever option they have. So let’s move on to more important details. An interesting feature MeeGo brings is the MultiTasking Carousel. The carousel offers two views.

The first of them is similar to the view found in the Nokia N8.  Like in Maemo 5, the background is the same as the one found in the home screen. The difference is that it’s darkened and blurred so the carrousel actually pops out and becomes easier to view. With this design, Nokia has done a good job in properly displaying what’s important and helping the user focus on that. The less important info is dimmed (blurred) and out of focus. Apparently, the carousel is highly customizable as well. The size of the cards, amount of card overlap, zoom or speed with which you flip through cards can all be modified in themes.

The second view is a simpler, grid type kind of view that was also present in Maemo 5. According to most people, Maemo 5 offers the best multitasking UI for a power user, so adopting the same UI for MeeGo is a pretty smart move. The amount of rows as well as the spacing between them will also be customizeable, to the great delight of users who simply must have things a certain way.

The standard app launcher view is pretty average and somewhat similar to the one found in the iPhone. The launcher bar on the bottom is fixed, while on the top you’ll get a 3 x 4 grid of various application icons. The nice part about MeeGo is that it brings a lot of options for how everything looks. Users will apparently be able to change icon size, font, sound, haptics and feedback graphics. To move to a second page of apps, the user can simply swipe a finger sideways.

If this sounds interesting, a higher number of photos as well as more interesting information can be found on the MeeGo Blog. So far, MeeGo is shaping up as a nice looking operating system. Sure, some elements were ”borrowed” for competing OSs, but we sure wouldn’t mind an operating system that steals the best ideas from all other platforms for smartphones  currently available on the market and then cleverly mixes them up into one package that no one will be able to resist.