NOKIA Vision

Nokia’s promise to overhaul the Symbian UI yesterday was heavy on stats but light on screenshots, but thankfully the company’s webcast is fair overflowing with concept renders.

The Finnish company has promised not only to make the UI more attractive – by cutting out clutter and upping scrolling rates from 15fps to 60fps – but more functional too, slicing out the number of taps required to complete tasks or launch features, and giving users “large capacitive displays” to do that tapping on.

It’s probably too much to expect the slick concept device Nokia’s designers have thrown together to be anything like what the company have on the drawing boards, but we certainly wouldn’t argue with a keyboard-free capacitive version of the N900. One of the biggest changes, Nokia claims, will be removing some of the more frustrating user prompts, and with 350 of them that’s a decent move toward a less-frustrating owner experience.

In the end, we’ll have to see exactly what Nokia come up with on shipping devices; we’ve seen concept videos and mock-ups before, but there seems to be something stopping those excellent ideas from transitioning to production handsets. Still, with two “major product milestones” on the cards for 2010, and the UI project underway, Nokia don’t look to be taking their flattening market share lying down.

Nokia’s The Way We Live Next 3.0 event isn’t intended to launch new hardware – they had Nokia World a few months back for that – but they couldn’t let the day pass without revealing a few details as to how they envisage devices and services of the future functioning. Heikki Norta, SVP of corporate strategy, took to the stage to show a demo video of possible mobile life in 2015, complete with location sharing, face recognition and that old mainstay of futurology concepts, projection keyboards. There’s also a pretty impressive dual-display netbook and a modular system which can easily switch your “passport data” between a full-sized handset and a smaller unit more suited to exercise-wear.

In their vision, neither the device nor the “cloud” services are totally responsible for the mobile experience. Rather than viewing the handset as a “window” onto the cloud, or as a standalone device, the system always uses the most efficient method of computation available to it. In an area overspilling with wireless bandwidth, that might mean using remote servers to crunch streaming video and pick out individual faces; while on a plane – assuming there’s no WiFi available, or airlines of 2015 have raised their prices so high we can’t afford to access it – the device would be self-sufficient.

It’s important to remember that, as a concept, we shouldn’t necessarily expect to see any of the functionality in the video arrive in shipping devices. Still, Nokia have told us they’re targeting 300m active service users by the end of 2011, and to reach that figure it’s going to take some serious selling of the benefits of not only innovative devices once every two years, but services that establish an ongoing