19 May 2007

S60 platform to get the powerful
TAT's Kastor UI???

To be completely honest with you I feeling a slightly lazy after the long weekend but I know that you're probably expecting some juice news so let's start with something truly awful.

There are some really intriguing rumors about the fancy Kastor UI with some juice details about the upcoming firmware version for the Nokia N95 that spreading over at our forum section lately and although everything is unconfirmed and based on the years old video I’ve decide to inform you about.

The most interesting thing in whole story is the mentioned fancy Kastor UI, TAT’s technology and its advanced UI layouting with a fast and smooth animations, transitions, wipes and fancy effects looks quite impressive and there is no doubt that Kastor UI will push S60 platform on entire new level.

Mobile phone user interface is where communication between the user and the handset takes place, where the relationship is created and Kastor opens up a broad spectrum of possibilities for customization and creating the more eye friendly user interface.

Beside the mentioned Kastor UI, rumored upcoming firmware version (v30) for Nokia N95-1 will bring bunch on new features ASR, NGI, OVI, etc. .. . .

• Full NGI
• Video content
• Maps 2.0
• Kastor UI
• Share online 3.0 with Ovi
• Nokia search with Google plug in
• Changes to music Shop and player
• Automatic screen Rotation
• Download 3.1

I know, I know, it sounds too good to be true and it opens lot of questions! First of all some of the features that are part of the Kastor UI have been already implemented in the S60 UI Feature Pack 2, smooth scrolling, animated 3D like transitions but Kastor still looks lot better and therefore it is hardly to believe that Nokia will equips its older device with a better UI than they offer on brand new devices like Nokia N96 or Nokia N78.

From other hand, Symbian has recently introduce the two new technologies, ScreenPlay and FreeWay that promises the interface with similar functionality and look like TAT’s Kastor UI. In my personal opinion Nokia will rather choose the technologies that come as the part of the OS than implement the 3rd party solution that will run over the S60 platform and cause further slowdown in performance?!?

Hardware is another tricky part, hardware limitations often cause phone manufacturers to compromise on the visual representation of graphical user interfaces, hindering them from fully expressing their brand values and usability and I am really not sure if our lovely phones are capable to process such a graphic with acceptable speed.