Why OS integration beats slickness

Published by at

There's an interesting piece over at Gary Moncrieff's blog today that struck a chord with me. He talks about slick applications like SPB Shell, Profimail and Gravity but then explains why he'd rather go with Nokia's built-in solutions for Symbian^3 because they're far better integrated into the homescreen and Contacts. Go have a read and see if you agree.

"Recent features like suggestions when you start typing a name are nice, but where the Social app wins for me is again the integration with contacts. I can instantly see a friends last update on their summary card between them. The single feed showing both Twitter and Facebook updates offers a quicker way to quickly check updates. Even without FB notifications the FB client is much better than Gravity’s implementation and I dont think Social gets enough credit when the two are compared. The Twitter client isn’t as strong as Gravity but for myself and many others it does everything we need.

While the push notifications were a welcome feature on my Vivaz I am now that used to the notifications widget on the E7 that these seem a little intrusive and whenever I do use Gravity I make sure to turn them off. For me they just seem a little too in your face now on a Symbian^3 device and integrating with the notifications widget would be a cleaner solution."

Here's the full blog entry.