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Comment by tjogin | Hacker News Reader

The video featuring Nokia's SVP of design really fascinates me. He introduces the idea of using touch swipes as something really revolutionary, that "changes our perception of how we use technology". I'm sure it really would have been revolutionary, four years ago. Before Windows Phone 7, before Android, before WebOS and before iPhone.

Of course, it's just a marketing video. But the idea of using touch swipes to navigate around your smartphone is not even a little bit revolutionary in 2011. It's not new, fresh, remarkable or special in any way. It kind of makes Nokia look like they were born yesterday; enamored and fascinated with what they think is "new" technology.

I'm left wondering if what we're seeing in this marketing video is not what Nokia wants us to think about their new product, but how much of a dinosaur Nokia really is.

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"This changes everything. Again."

Come on, Steve Jobs spouts this kind of hyperbole at every single product launch.

True. FaceTime was touted as a big innovation, when my classmates used video phones back in 2003. I also went to university with a deaf and mute girl who used it to communicate with her friends in sign language.

The video cinematography was a bit too Apple-inspired for my taste, though, but at least it looked professional. Not used to seeing that, at least from competitors.

I'm not talking about the hyperbole itself, I'm talking about how they're hyping something everybody else thinks of as common already.

FaceTime would have been kind of like that if everybody had been making video phone calls every day since four years ago. Most people had never made a single video phone call, most people still haven't.

Using touch swipes on their phone though, everybody has, every day, for years. Outside of Nokia, that is.

I disagree. What Nokia is solving here is true buttonless navigation. No one else is using swiping in that way. However everyone is trying to go buttonless. Android has done it in the easiest way, replacing hardware with software buttons and calling them not-buttons. It has been rumored that iOS will go buttonless too, but who knows how. WebOS is the only that has kind of done this. You can navigate WebOS without buttons but it still has a "button" in the gesture area that most people use anyways. Swipe is the first time someone has been able to make the OS buttonless in a way that doesn't feel tacked on. Calling that revolutionary is hyperbole, but it is an important UI development for where we are inevitably going.

I think that using swipe as the main (almost exclusive) way to navigate around the phone's functions is indeed, well, not revolutionary, but (at least to some extent) innovative and yes, also "new, fresh, remarkable". Sure, UI borrows some ideas from WinMo7, maybe from webOS too, but it's still much fresher than, say, Android.

Swipes are not revolutionary, but using them as the main way to navigate through the UI is innovative, making the N9 not need any buttons for navigation.

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