Interesting to note that most all of the visual design goodness in Mobile Awesomeness is iPhone.

The online extract includes some of the footnote links slightly out of context. Nonetheless, it’s kind of good that they’re there, because Punchcut and Barbara Ballard have always been great references for me.

Gerry Gaffney was a great editor; he patiently helped me forge something coherent and focused.

Thoughts:

• It has a lot of buttons
• There’s no sliding keyboard, and no stylus
• The camera is 5 MP, it has a flash
• It has video but it doesn’t focus
• It probably doesn’t have GPS
• “The keyboard is not really that good yet…”
• When you’re taking a photo, it shows you a preview of the previous photo taken. Which is weird.

Luckily the current generation of high-end mobile browsers is excellent in terms of support for modern features. Many phones use a WebKit derivative, including the iPhone, and Symbian and Android phones. Other phones either come with or can use Opera Mobile or the new mobile version of Firefox (called Fennec). For the most part, very few changes are needed in order to support these browsers.

Code.Flickr article

The Motorola has a pretty ordinary web experience, so it’s not the strongest contender the regular mobile device world could have offered up in this unintentional side-by-side, but the improvements apparent in the screenshots probably have pretty wide application across smartphones.

The iPhone layout is consistent and logical, it’s seems easier to know where you are, what actions are available and what information is available. The Motorola squanders alot of screenspace on browser info and soft key labels and there appears to scrolling for all but the most basic of screens.

The difference in the readability of text is remarkable, and the form buttons look like buttons, and so benefit from people not having to learn a visual language different to large-screen web conventions.

And at a glance you’d surmise that the above would mean the propensity for errors – be it entering your password, or adding a transaction, or navigating to the page you need – would be lower for the iPhone. If you were thinking about where to devote your energies in mobile web platforms, getting a sense of the difference in experiences is really useful alongside knowing your audience and what they like.

Wesabe Mobile

Which is the perfect excuse to embed this:

…an interdisciplinary team of scientists of the University of Washington (UW) has developed Vocal Joystick, a software which enables people with disabilities to control their computers using the sound of their voice and without the need to use a mouse.

via ZDNet

“One of the most significant additions in Maemo 5 is the Clutter library, which facilitates rapid development of rich graphical user interfaces. Support for Clutter on top of OpenGL ES 2.0 will enable developers to completely redefine the Maemo user experience. Clutter provides a scene-graph system and frame-based animation engine for displaying and manipulating graphical elements. It can be used to implement rich visual effects and sophisticated interactive user interfaces that stretch beyond the boundaries of conventional widget toolkits.”

Clutter Demo

“The extreme versatility of Clutter makes it highly conducive to innovative user interface design, but also creates some challenges. There are no constraints to ensure basic consistency between Clutter-based user interfaces. Nokia will have to provide some clearly-defined guidelines so that third-party developers will be able to make Clutter user interfaces that don’t detract from the visual cohesion of the platform.”

src Nokia will bring bling and finger-friendliness to Maemo 5

It looks great – what a guy. Pioneers online communities and now rad WP themes.