Samsung Bada and Qt powered Symbian interface demo

Samsung has announced yet another smartphone platform which they dub as Bada. Seriously, do we need yet another smartphone platform? There are currently a couple of open source smartphone platforms on the western market - Symbian, Android and LiMo. Then we have proprietary OSes like Windows Mobile, Blackberry, Apple and WebOS (the last three should not be counted as they are not licensed to other manufacturers, but whatever).

I owned a Samsung Z500 (you know, the one based on the Estella Warren E700 phone) a couple of years ago. Sold it after a week or so as I found the UI horrible to use. Seriously, it was a disaster and was light years behind Nokia's Series 40 and Sony Ericsson's uber fantastic A200 platform. I also had an Omnia i900 for a while and playing with their custom UI on top of Windows Mobile was just an awful experience I want to forget. You would think that Samsung, of all conglomerates and probably the largest of the all the major phone manufacturers, would have the resources to at least match HTC's WinMob effort but no. Touchwiz, in comparison to HTC Sense, is a hack job.

Seriously Samsung, just give it up. You are terrible at designing user interfaces. And stop copying your competitor's design for fuck's sake. Hire some good product designers for once. And getting Giorgio Armani to put his name on one of your phones isn't one of them.

Anyway since we are on the subject of mobile OSes, check out this video of Qt powered Symbian^1 interface running on a touchscreen phone (via AAS)



Future Symbian releases won't look anything like the above but it will give you an idea of how a Qt application framework is expected to perform when it replace S60/Avkon from Symbian^4 onwards.