Purism Shows Off Latest GNOME Mobile Shell Mockups For The Librem 5

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Purism Shows Off Latest GNOME Mobile Shell Mockups For The Librem 5

The Purism crew working on the privacy-minded Librem 5 GNU/Linux smartphone have shared off their latest design plans...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Librem-5-Design-May-Mockups

[tildearrow]

My only minor complaints:

- The camera position in the rear makes me feel weird.
- The phone icon is reversed.
- "Submitting" passcodes? Wouldn't "OK" or "Confirm" be a better word?

[tessio]

The visual style looks straight from 2010...

[Awesomeness]

we wish to push upstream to become the GNOME mobile shell

That sounds way less confident than previously when they stated that all their work is upstreamable to Gnome. I guess the news that their mobile shell is not based on Gnome code at all but a fork of a 3rd party Wayland compositor reached inner Gnome circles. Let's see if their work becomes just another Hildon.

[ElectricPrism]

In terms of clarity of vision and delivery -- the aesthetic looks excellent.

Now the translation to tangible, working code.

And then finally after launch and review people like me come in to buy it if we feel that it can replace our existing needs okay.

Step 2 will be the longest and determine the outcome of step 3.

[OneBitUser]

My only minor complaints:

- The camera position in the rear makes me feel weird.
- The phone icon is reversed.
- "Submitting" passcodes? Wouldn't "OK" or "Confirm" be a better word?

Are you seriously trying to approach something called "Gnome" from a UX design standpoint?

You are gonna have a bad time...

[microcode]

Looks okay, we need to add some stuff for form factors to AppStream I think, or GNOME Software is going to show you a bunch of desktop screenshots of desktop applications, and it'll be hard to tell if there is a form-factor-optimized view of the app or not. Also probably a good time to decide if we should build separate binaries/entry points for mobile views, or make them "reactive".

[mrtruxton]

I don't hate the style. its not super special. But it is pretty clean.
Basically this mockup is just an artist impression to see how people would respond and i wouldn't be too bothered by it.
This finishing product is probably going to look quite different.

What might be more interesting is to take a look into the app/buttons they include, as this might give more of an idea for the functionality they have in mind.

I am wondering what that "social" button is going to do.
It looks a bit like grouping all the social activities under one app/button.

I always loved the approach that the Nokia N900 took.
What they did was take "Pidgin" application as the basis for storing phone contacts.
Then it was possible to add all kind of communication types to these contacts. ( IRC, MSN, Skype, etc )
This way you only needed on adresbook that would truly manage all your contact details.
All contact communication indifferent of protocol could be should together.
It was a very refreshing approach on mobile for me.

As Purism cannot possible include apps like facebook, skype because they are security bombs maybe something like this than that in itself might be a unique selling point that would make me interested in buying one.

Pidgin nowadays supports skype, wechat, twitter, whatsapp, facebook chat and many other plugins people care about.
Posting on social media might not be the most "safe" thing in the first place.
But if you accept that what you post is public information than such an approach would at least make a complete open source solution and make it more likely that there are no backdoors in the code on your phone while still enabling you to do what most other people do in their lives.

[brrrrttttt]

The visual style looks straight from 2010...

Here was me thinking it looked nice, simple, unobtrusive, and 9000x better than anything Samsung ever inflicted on the world.

[Hi-Angel]

Worth noting, per the original post, the UX everyone is discussing here is a "starting point", "phase 1" as they called it. It's what should be shipped in 2019 because if they'd target lots of features to everyone's taste, development might as well go on infinitely.

I personally fine with this style, especially given I can use the phone for hacking without dealing with all the tedious and boring idiosyncrasies of Android.