MeeGo Smartphone UI Guidelines Detailed

We've already seen Nokia and Intel's plans for the MeeGo UI for netbooks, but so far the smartphone UI has been something of a mystery.  Now, thanks to a prematurely posted – and since yanked – document titled "MeeGo Handset Interaction Guidelines" (which is still available to view through Google's cache), we know that the MeeGo team have been studying Android and webOS for some of their inspiration.

For instance, there's a task manager which blends both the icon-grid view of Android with moveable thumbnails like on webOS, switched between by using a pinch-zoom gesture:

The default view of the switcher presents the latest accessed task in focus, with the other, different tasks running to the right. Thumbnails are presented in chronological order, as they are opened. It is possible to browse through the thumbnails, one by one, by slowly dragging them, or to use a quick swipe to rapidly pan from one side of the list to the other. Users can use a pinch multi-touch motion to change the switcher into an overview mode. By pinching in, thumbnails move into a grid display.

Meanwhile there's also an Android-style notification bar at the top, which can be dragged down to display recent updates, events and similar information.  To be honest, the MeeGo developers have picked some pretty decent examples to crib from; we love webOS's UI and Android's notifications system is pretty slick too.  The worst thing they could've done is "borrowed" pop-up push notifications from iOS, frankly.

[via The Nokia Blog]