HTC, best known for its wide range of Windows Mobile devices, today announced the Touch Diamond, an update to its Touch device released several months back. The Touch was notable because of the TouchFLO UI, an HTC-created, customized user interface that ran on top of Windows Mobile. The Diamond features a new version, called TouchFLO 3D, that looks way slicker. It looks gorgeous — so much so that you might almost forget you’re using a Windows Mobile device. Check out this video:
Windows Mobile, in this case, is really just the OS, separated from the user interface by HTC. That fits with something I’ve been wondering about for a while: will the top mobile operating systems of the future be the ones that make this sort of UI customization the easiest? This is a growing trend. Apart from HTC, Sony Ericsson is adding its own UI on top of WinMo for the XPERIA X1, Asus has shown off its own UI enhancements, and there’s some other examples.
And this goes along with the continued trend of some pretty bad user interfaces. I’ve used the new Windows Mobile 6.1, which was billed as having a number of UI improvements, but they’re not much help in the overall mess of things. S60 has gotten faster and had some marginal improvements, but it’s still not the most usable interface around.
Perhaps we’re seeing a couple of things: either people viewing Windows Mobile as a decent OS if you can totally hide the native UI, or enough frustration with the state of smartphone UIs to where people are just scrapping them in favor of their own. So will the leading mobile OSes of the future be those that come without a UI, and make it the easiest for UI designers to make their own?
It’s not an original idea, there’s the numerous variants of UI on top of the Symbian OS - UIQ, S60, MOAP, plus the defunct Series 80 and 90.
It’s not a bad approach, especially if the core UI really wasn’t designed for mobile…
I see this as slightly different than the Symbian situation as it stands — as nobody bar the three long-established UI vendors you mention are taking the OS and creating their own UI for it, whereas there are multiple S60, UIQ and MOAP licensees. You get the impression that creating a UI to run on top of Symbian is a very significant undertaking, and probably less simple than in Windows Mobile (otherwise I’d assume that SE would have used Symbian for the X1, rather than WM). Perhaps it’s something that can change in future — making it easier for people to create custom UIs on top of Symbian, rather than having to license one of the existing ones.
It still has the Windows start icon at the top. It looks like the TouchFLO is just a widget shell at the idle screen level. Curious to see what happens when you try compose a message, update the address book or god help you, try to adjust the wifi settings.
[…] Link: YouTube – HTC TouchFLO 3D Video on HTC Diamond (youtube.com, via) […]