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Sony Ericsson has leaked a new video of a prototype Android UI they call “Rachael” which has “This is just a concept for internal use only, sit the hell down” warnings all over it. Once you accept that fact that you can’t buy a phone with this UI today, tomorrow, or possibly ever (or possibly in 4 days with the Xperia X3), the video is a very interesting picture of a direction User Interfaces may be going.

The interface is heavily Zune HD influenced. For example, the focus on thumbnails and graphics, the use of album and secondary art, the way the choices are arranged and presented…especially the way that screens move in and out fluidly and from all directions. In fact, watching Rachael it makes me appreciate all the more how conservative and controlled the Zune HD team were, since in this demo video things swirl and flash around a bit too much, as if the developers were doing things just to show they could. Actually, since this is a concept, they likely WERE just doing some of those swirly effects just to show the capabilities of the platform…it still makes me a bit bilious.

As for the direction of mobile UIs today, I think we are going to be seeing more and more Zune style interfaces as designers adjust to the power inherent in such tools as Tegra chips and the Snapdragon platform. The days of static lists of music  or contacts are definitely gone, whatever OS you are using.

So what do you think, is this hot little media UI another brick in Android’s wall, or another lame attempt at stealing Apple’s thunder?

(Source: Gizmodo)

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Zealot (476 Posts) - Website | Twitter | Facebook

By day a department manager and writer for a major network device vendor...by night Zealot stalks the mean magnetic streets, striking fear into the hearts of bandwidth abusers and theme park mascots. Zealot has been involved with mobile devices for more than a decade now, starting off with dumb phones, moving to PDAs and then to smartphones, notebooks and netbooks with the odd PMP thrown in. Most of his mobile time currently is spent on a Treo Pro, Zune HD, Thinkpad T61, Gigabyte M912M or a Hackintoshed Compaq Mini 704. He proudly groks the Geek community and considers himself a Neo Maxi Zune Dweebie (thanks Will Wheaton!).