After we broke the news this morning that Nokia was cracking away at a phone-friendly and potentially ad-supported version of their Internet tablet OS, Maemo, we figured we might be able to swing a screenshot.
Sure enough, our boy Sirm came through. With that, we present the world’s first ever look at the mobile OS Nokia tentatively plans on launching around the end of 2010: Maemo Harmattan.
As we mentioned in the earlier post, the Maemo Harmattan homescreen is essentially one big vertically scrollable page, filled from top-to-bottom with user selectable widgets. All of the widgets are deeply integrated with each other and the rest of the OS.
If you look closely, you’ll notice that only the top third or so of the image below has the blue background color. This is representative of the area visible on screen at one time. The background remains static, while the widgets float above it as the user slides them across the screen. Nokia’s obviously designing this interface for a widescreen display – but given the current trend of nearly every touchscreen being wide, that makes perfect sense.
Curiously, the ad widgets we disclosed earlier today are absent from this screenshot. Be it that Nokia moves forward with the ad widget concept and carriers embrace it (remember: the idea is that in exchange for ads on the homescreen, customers get a discount of some sort), ad-enabled handsets will have ad units locked in place between widgets.
We’ve run this screenshot past a few Nokians for authentication; while none were willing to outright verify it, they all said it looked perfectly legitimate to them. (Yeah – we noticed the “Tounament” typo in the calendar widget. We’ve got plenty of typos in our own calendar, so we’re not doubting it because of that.) Of course, Maemo Harmattan isn’t coming out until Q4 2010 at the earliest, so things might change. If it does, we’ll try to keep the screenshots flowing.
[Thanks, Sirm!]
