Been reading about the Orange home screen on Symbian phones.
"It looks like they are producing several versions of it, with differing numbers of icons and features with different graphics for different 'peoples'. They seem to want to configure your phone to give you everything you could want on the home screen, being you a housewife with just three icons or a business person with 8 or so. This is speculation and has been inferred from several things I've seen today but the Orange signature devices with the home screen (Series 60, SPV etc) seem to be what its all about."
I have to say, the more I use my N70, the more the "Home Screen" really pisses me off. Most anoying of all is the fact I can't disable it. It's in the bloody firmware. Now, if I could only pluck up the courage to spend two hours on the phone with Orange to find someone who could at least show me how to customise the thing...
From an IA point of view, I can see where they're coming from. This is the often-times fantasy of a "shelf" navigation, a place where all things can be pointed to. This type of nav really works if you can find a common thread running between the items on the shelf. In the case of the N70, that means that a Snake Game, a tool to manage your memory card, some help documentation a Microsoft Word reading tool are all lumped together with no consideration of use case.
