Nokia provided a glimpse into its MeeGo operating system (OS) future yesterday, at the LeWeb 2010 conference currently underway in Paris.

 

Marko Ahtisaari, Nokia’s SVP Design and User Experience, spoke about the patterns utilised by the biggest players of the smartphone industry within their interfaces and user experience designs.

 

He kicked off with Apple’s iOS, which is used on its iPhone 4 amongst other devices. “You get screens full of apps and a physical home key. It’s a very beautiful, elegant and simple pattern. It’s almost like navigating through a house. You’re at the front door and you can go into the dining room. If you want to go to the living room, you go back to the front door and then straight into there.”

 

Then he moved onto the next pattern, employed by his own company within its Symbian devices, (the likes of the C7) as well as by companies utilising Google’s Android mobile OS. This pattern being multiple, personalisable home-screens, which the user fills with their own preference of widgets.

 

“Doing that is so simple and organic that they end up being able to use the whole phone from their homescreens. This content can take many different forms, such as shortcuts to apps and live information widgets. These two patterns are both very interesting, but it’s hard to believe that this is where smartphone evolution ends.”

 

Ahtisaari then used the example of the recently launched Windows Phone 7 Series OS, to point out that smartphone makers don’t have to stick with the norm and that there is a gap in the market for new patterns. 

 

Redmond’s new mobile OS’ interface sports Hubs for categories such as People, Music and Video, Photos, Games and Office. These Hubs congregates the phone’s functionality, for example the People Hub pulls in Facebook status updates from friends as well as providing the user with a list of their contact’s phone numbers. “It’s very interesting but it’s too early to tell how successful it will be.”

 

He then concluded by stating that Nokia too, will be introducing its own new pattern with MeeGo in 2011. He didn’t provide a demo or video of this new interface though. Nokia also recently revealed that its Ovi Store has reached the three million downloads per day milestone.