Nokia provides a first look at the future Symbian interface

Nokia has released a more information about the new features which will be seen on their Symbian mobile interface from next year.

Nokia revealed during their Capital Market Day yesterday that they were looking to renovate their Symbian mobile user interface so that it continues to be one of their major building blocks over the medium term.

Besides improving on their Smartphone’s with keyboard, and especially those with tactile interfaces, the Finnish group is looking to improve the OS’ appearance while remaining attached to its base, dispelling rumours that they would be looking at using Maemo.

According to 2011 estimations, it is the Series 40 handsets (features phones) which will see reduced market share and sales, while the Symbian Smartphone’s will start to be seen more and more often at the lower end of the market.

Among the changes which will be seen at Nokia in 2010, thanks to new hardware and improvements to their software, is support for multi-touch on an interface offering three time better reactivity then what is currently seen, changing from 15 fps to 60 fps which will provide better fluidness.

At the same time, the ergonomics have been thought out so that the number of actions required to launch a function have been reduced. Nokia has confirmed that you will only need 2 actions to access multimedia content, against the 8 that is required in the current interface. Improvements have also been planned for the Web browsing on their handsets.

These advances will be seen with the arrival of Symbian^3 while waiting for the release of Symbian^4 which will use the Qt environment, but which wont be seen before the end of 2010.