Menu and OVI
The new thing about the menu is that the starting screen changed completely. The default things are the clock, the currently used profile and the date (and of course the usual icons in the top row displaying signal strength, battery level and missed events), but besides these we have five rows of the same size where we can put all kinds of interactive stuff (widgets).
There are lots of widgets by default, and after a short time I’ve put my four favorite contacts, four shortcut icons (that’s 2 widgets by now), the small Facebook app, AccuWeather and the Reuters newsfeed on the screen. These last three are of course updated automatically if we have an active internet connection (the V10 software asks us about this randomly). Instead of these we can have other stuff displayed as well, we can expand the quicklaunch bar, we can have four other favorite contacts, we can see the calendar alarms and there is a series of other stuff that update like an RSS-feed.
We can see this interface both when the phone is opened and closed, in the first case we get a 2x3 layout, while in the second position the six rows are one over the other in a single column and we can even rearrange them. If someone doesn’t like these, they can be disabled, but there isn’t anything else instead. Of course all widgets can be tapped and the relevant interface opens up (the Facebook site, the AccuWeather application and so on), so it’s quite a nice thing, I’ve liked it.
Anyway this widget system assumes that we have an unlimited internet subscription and that we have the possibility of charging the phone every day, as the almost continuous data traffic and TCP connection has a high power need. If the army of widgets is working the phone won’t take it much longer than a day. The other part of the story is OVI. This is Nokia’s web-based software store, it appears everywhere in the menu system where it could be a bit relevant. Currently there aren’t many serious applications on OVI, but I’ve tried a few of them and I would like to apply to our readers who are into software developing that a MobileArsenal widget would be a really adequate one on the standby screen of N97…
OVI’s database includes a couple of nice programs, some widgets, tons of themes (I think I don’t even have to mention that N97 can be completely redesigned with themes), but the offer is quite limited right now. I haven’t really seen expensive apps, the non-free ones cost about 2-3 euros, but there is a lot of free software as well. We will soon have a larger article about OVI services and business model.
A cikk még nem ért véget, kérlek, lapozz!
