>>Nokia Head of Design Marko Ahtisaari talks about priorities, competition, and future direction
Roadmap
Nokia's future roadmap is drawn around a tripartite portfolio -- you'll have S40-class f... f... featurephones (No, bad blogger! It's a smartphone!), Symbian^3 and ^4 smartphones deluxe, and MeeGo-based godzilla smartphones. We can't guarantee those particular words were used in the meeting, but the portfolio "has to be smart right across." That means a plurality of things, firstly it means that the low-end devices will not be deprived of new features, like location-aware and social networking services, but it also means "UI style innovation," which you may decode as refreshments to the grid- and list-based means by which we're used to navigating our phones today.MeeGo seems to be viewed as the platform with the greatest potential for innovation, given its larger screen, and there were some hints that those screens are only going to expand. Further probing around Nokia tablets or netbooks was unceremoniously dismissed and it really looks like the company will be knuckling down on sorting what Marko described as "truly mobile ... not luggable" hardware. One other thing he highlighted was that touchscreen interfaces nowadays require the user to constantly look at them, whereas it's in Nokia's DNA to produce devices that can be used easily with one hand or by the blind, and he left us with a big fat mystery to ponder about how that might be achieved with vast touchscreen devices. Haptic feedback (anyone heard from Haptikos lately? We're getting worried) was not ruled out, but it seemed like Nokia might try out some audio-based interface concepts and see where things might go.
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