Although I suppose technically I’m a designer, as you may gather from my blog I’ve got quite an interest in mobile technology and interfaces. Having used Nokia phones for years, and specifically ones running the Symbian OS, I’ve found that although the technology within the device is constantly developing and changing, the operating system has remained more or less the same for the last 4 or 5 years. I’ve changed to UIQ 3 on a Sony Ericsson P1i to see what the deal is, and after a week and a bit of use it seems to be more than user friendly and a nice step up from the limitations of S60.

Since the launch of the iPhone I think a new benchmark has been set in terms of interface design on phones, especially the way that applications work and interact with each other. There are probably hundreds of reviews on the net of the iPhone UI from people much more qualified than myself, so I won’t go into that.

Symbian recently previewed ‘Symbian Touch’, a touch screen version of their standard UI used on N series phones. I’ll let people make up their own minds, but I still think there’s a lot of developments that could have been made to the aesthetics of the interface - without directly copying the iPhone. Now phones have been opened up - the screen is now pretty much the size of the device - companies have almost infinite play over the way they use the screen as a canvas.

The development of the touch screen interface is probably as significant as the change from B+W LCD to colour screens, I think we’re yet to see the real ‘next generation’ mobile phone.