We were lucky enough to get a few days with the Aava / Intel / Meego phone earlier this year and our tests with the handset UX showed that there was a lot of work to do. In a presentation at the MeeGo onference in Dublin today, we saw progress, a good working demo and future planning but still, there’s so much missing. Granted, these user-experiences are just baseline builds to show how the core features can be used but still, it seems to us there are some hooks that need to be added.
With no active icons support (showing number of unread emails for example) and a single homescreen with no widget support it means that product developers will have a lot of work to do to implement these features. On the other hand, the notifications subsystem looks good with support for multiple notification types triggering multiple different notification methods including notification lights, haptics and of course, dialog boxes. We didn’t see any dialog box handling mechanism though so we’re hoping this will be well controlled when it gets implemented.
The demo was done on a Moorestown based Aava Smartphone platform.
Ugh, between the lenovo giveaway and the aava used for demoing the x86 bias is still heavy in meego. Nokia and linaro members may want to step up the pace here.
I really hope that nokia is holding back alot of UI code internally and release it ASAP.
Because if there is no multiple desktops as an example, in the enduser products, then who the hell will buy it?
I mean even the Symbian has it and IMHO Maemo with HildonDesktop seems far more ready atm even if Gtk+ has its drawbacks…
I guess the kleyproblem with QT atm is there is no “desktop widget API” for QT?
How about using Plasma from KDE as desktops widgets maybe? :-)
We canb only hope…