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Comment by vital101 | Hacker News Reader

Two months ago my contract was up with AT&T, so I decided "What the hell, I'm going to purchase an iPhone(4)!". So I did. Turns out, after all the hype I was completely underwhelmed by it. It's not that it's a bad phone, it's great. It's just that the general OS feels tired to me. The interface. I ended up playing with a Samsung Focus a few days later in the same AT&T store and swapped my iPhone for it. I'm incredibly happy with this phone, and the Mango update addressed many of my concerns. Microsoft did well on the core features with this phone, which for a user like me is everything. I'm not a particularly heavy app user, so the seeming lack of quality apps doesn't bother me (even though there seems to have been an upturn in good apps lately).

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>It's just that the general OS feels tired to me.

What does this even mean?

The OSX look is pretty old at this point. They've managed to update it in spots but much of it is dreadfully ugly. Like this:

http://admintell.napco.com/ee/images/uploads/appletell/bill-...

Note that Metro is pretty old too, it started with Windows Media Center, but has changed a lot since then.

"much of [iOS] is dreadfully ugly"

This is complete unadulterated bs. Thank you for a good laugh today.

Can you post a screenshot (or a link) to a similar page from an OS that doesn't look tired to you? Not criticizing you -- just want to know what you think.

Can't speak for the OP, but the WP7 interface does not look tired to me:

http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/tom-keating/images/windows-phone...

That home screen is the perfect mix of iPhone (structured, but with minimal ability to display info) and Android (stacked with widgets, but a mess layout-wise).

The UI in WP7 is incredibly person-centric- I look up their entry in the phone book, it shows me their updates on various social networks, as well as a "history" tab that aggregates all our chats, e-mails and text messages into one list. It's very slick.

That shot of WP7 also looks a lot less functional than the above one of iOS. Apple's interface is well-organized; the purpose of each screen element and the results a user should expect from manipulating it are fairly clear and unambiguous.

The WP7 UI seems to be following Microsoft's recent "haphazard grid of inconsistent elements" approach, which works about as well as the ribbon.

How do you figure that? The WP7 tile list is a list of apps, just the same as iOS icons. Except that apps can push a hell of a lot more information onto their tiles than iOS apps can to their icons. I struggle to see how that is less functional.

With the exception of the single number-bubble, iOS icons don't include dynamic information on them, and therefore aren't regularly changing in appearance.

The icon to run the photo viewer in WP7 appears to consist entirely of a thumbnail of an image from your photo album. That means that every time you take a new photo, the image changes.

Your contact list application itself contains a grid of thumbnails of contact photos, which is a superfluous feature, and may cause a lot of confusion if other applications also contain a grid of content thumbnails.

Pushing information onto tiles is itself one of the key usability problems with WP7. The controls that you interact with to invoke functions should not do double-duty as general-purpose info delivery systems. Apple gets this right; the ability of controls to convey information is limited to conveying state information that indicates whether/when you need to interact with the control itself, and the shape, placement, coloring, and imagery of the control don't change for trivial reasons.

I understand the visual appeal of the Metro UI, but ultimately, this is supposed to be a functional user interface, not a Mondrian print.

A video here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=locNEna0of4&hd=1

Every other mobile OS presents you with a "sea of icons" as the home screen which is pretty boring by now and is essentially a rehash of this http://images.yourdictionary.com/images/computer/_PROGMAN.GI...

Screens simulated. Sequences shortened.

Live tiles look like an interesting way to see a limited view of the data or activity available within an application. They seem to reduce the number of application targets to 8 (or fewer if the application wants more than one square).

What do you mean by a similar page? A settings page? Settings pages aren't usually visually attractive, they are utilitarian; but this one is (at least to me) offensively ugly. For example, I count 6 different shades of blue used on this page, including a wallpaper design... to me this has a very old look to it.

This is pretty far into the land of "taste". One man's "old" is another's "iconic". If anything, it looks like the industry is moving more toward the iPhone's understated style (see Ice Cream Sandwhich) and emphasis on texture (look at the new Milk app) than the "anti-skeutomorph" thing, whose internal logic is a lot stronger than its appeal to most people. As someone that's been using Ableton Live for the better part of a decade, it's amusing to me that people even find this look remotely "fresh". MS will find out the hard way that designers and normal people like gradients, shadows, texture.

I'd call it cheesy, not tired.

Whether the OS looks good or not is, of course, subjective. But it's hard to argue that Apple have innovated all that much from the original release:

http://www.lookingforiphone.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/I...

to the latest:

http://admintell.napco.com/ee/images/uploads/appletell/Iphon...

By comparison, look at Android's first release:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/media/inline/91052290-CE47...

Compared to ICS:

http://hotcellularphone.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Andro...

WP7 is difficult to compare because it was effectively a complete reboot of the entire OS, but still. Apple's visual style has not changed much since 2007.

This is a disingenuous comparison. All you are doing is comparing the springboards. The underlying iOS is now vastly different than 1.0--multitasking, search, copy and paste, wireless sync, background processes, notification center, I can go on and on. If they got the springboard right, why change it? For the sake of change?

I'll admit that it isn't the most detailed comparison. But we're talking about iOS "looking" tired. Multi-tasking, wireless sync, background processes etc. really don't have an impact on the way the OS looks.

If they got the springboard right, why change it? For the sake of change?

I think the larger question is "did they get the Springboard right?". I don't think it is exactly the zenith of user experience, especially on a platform like the iPad.

Then the conversation should center around whether they got the springboard right, not if it hasn't changed. Whether or not it looks different is the wrong place to start.

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