Demo videos of Symbian^4 make you wonder…

It was only a few days ago when we saw Symbian^3 demoed on video for the first time, and now we get treated to a demo of the next iteration of Nokia’s now open-source platform – Symbian^4. By the looks of it, Symbian^4 will sport a really clean user interface, maybe even a step simpler than what we saw in Symbian^3’s video. Here in the first clip we see a demo of the homescreen that seems to be divided into 3 pages (innovation!), on which you can deploy widgets (even more innovation!). The second video presents the image gallery. It’s nice that we see some useful features here, such as the thumbnail field below the displayed image (you can see that from 0:30). Of course, very little part of the UI is shown here, so we cannot judge whether or not this operating system will actually have what it takes to match Android, bada, Windows Phone 7 Series and whatever Apple has in store for us this year…

… Which brings us to the question – what is taking these guys so long to release an OS that simple? We mean, look at Android and bada – these already look more contemporary than what we see in Symbian^4. Sure, this is still a work in progress no doubt, but wouldn’t it be better if they post some videos once they actually have something that’s worth watching at? We honestly hope that the so called Symbian Foundation or whatever it is will stop playing around and finally come up with a decent product. In a way, they can learn from Microsoft. Windows Mobile was considered dead, and Microsoft had no problem leaving it behind and going for something completely new with WP7S. Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to be the case with Nokia. And things get even worse when you know that the first handsets using Symbian^4 are expected to ship in the first half of 2011.

source: FierceWireless via TheNokiaBlog