“Matias Duarte, Android’s head of user experience… sits down at the head of the table. I ask him to start by telling me what’s been happening between Honeycomb, his first big project at Google, and Ice Cream Sandwich,” Joshua Topolsky reports for The Verge. “Matias explains… ‘Honeycomb was like: we need to get tablet support out there. We need to build not just the product, but even more than the product, the building blocks so that people stop doing silly things like taking a phone UI and stretching it out to a 10-inch tablet.’ It’s obvious that products like the original Galaxy Tab, with a bastardized version of Android for phones, annoyed him.”
“Then he pulls a dark gray slab out of his pocket and flicks on the screen. The Galaxy Nexus,” Topolsky reports. “The interface of the phone is completely new. It looks a lot like Honeycomb, but also shares much in common with Google’s new aesthetic that it’s been pushing for its web products. It’s clean and modern, and the company has removed the overly masculine, Tron-like feel to the OS. ‘Across the board Google and Android is taking design a lot more seriously,” Matias says, and points out that Roboto is used throughout the system. “There’s this thing that’s happening right now in user interface design that I find kind of shackling. The faux wood paneling trend, and the airport lavatory signage trend.’ He laughs when he says this and pulls up a slide on his computer, a split screen of an Atari 2600 and… airport lavatory signage. It’s an obvious dig at both Apple and Microsoft.”
Topolsky reports, “I ask why he came to the company in the first place. ‘I came here because they’re winning, but also because I could not stand the thought of there being another decade of being trapped in one paradigm, of being trapped in the past just because somebody manages to grab maximum marketshare, and then that’s the thing everybody uses with incremental evolution.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Matias could use a refresher course. All he needs to do is look at the state of Android before Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone in January 2007 and the way Android badly mimicked iPhone’s UI after. He’s already following Apple and he doesn’t even seem to know it.
And, if he thinks building profit-less market share by running endless BOGOF offers – giving away every other phone or sometimes even more than that – is “winning,” then he’s seriously misguided.
Apple owns the *ahem* Lion’s share of smartphone (and tablet) profits (#1 in the world), not Google or any other company that’s clearly and blatantly following Apple’s lead.
And, BTW, Duarte also lifted his “soul of the machine” idea directly from one Steven P. Jobs. Read more here