Samsung Bada screenshots hit the web, but what's with the Series 60 font?

John Biggs

Biggs is the East Coast Editor of TechCrunch. Biggs has written for the New York Times, InSync, USA Weekend, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Money and a number of other outlets on technology and wristwatches. He is the former editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.com and lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. You can Tweet him here and G+ him here. Email him directly at... → Learn More

Friday, December 18th, 2009

Samsung-bada-OS-UI-screenshots

Hey, good on Samsung for trying to make their own OS. I’m sure it will be wonderful for them. It saves them from having to, I don’t know, use Android? But what’s with all the Nokia Series 60 font usage in the UI?

These screenshots, which are floating around right now, show some of the UI elements of the new OS, Bada. The font they’re using is approximately (or exactly, I’m not a font scientist (fontographer?)) the same font used on most Series 60 Symbian phones.

Considering Samsung used to use Symbian it’s not a far reach to think that their UI team just hung on to some bad habits but S60 brings up a lot of bad memories for people.

Or could the worst be happening and is Samsung building Bada on top of Symbian, which is now ostensibly open source? We’ll ask, but we probably won’t want to know the answer.

blog comments powered by Disqus