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LG rolls out slick phone UI, invites you to play with it via desktop widget

by JG Mason on Jul 15, 2009 at 08:22 AM

LG is very proud of their S-Class OS and want everyone to get some playtime with it.  So the easiest way to do that is to create a downloadable widget for your computer and let you play with the 3D tumbling and sliding fun of the S-Class OS right from the comfort of your very own machine.  This is roughly the opposite of what Apple did with their OS-X migrating from computers to the iPhone OS.

The download is an interesting beast.  The widget uses InstallShield to install on your machine.  You are asked to agree to what I am sure are ridiculous terms and away the install goes.  Clicking on the cube icon launches the UI widget.  A cube appears allowing you to spin through the four main sides of the cube: Desktop, Widgets, Games, Multimedia.

From the sides of the cube you can access your computer programs and documents.  Swipes with the mouse causes the sides of the cube to rotate and the action is pretty neat.  The colors, icons and set up is all very attractively designed.  LG has taken some time building this UI and it shows.

The widget must have been created for the UK as London, Newcastle upon Tyne, and Leeds are some of the cities you can get the weather widget to work for.  Other than that, the widget seems OK for playing with for 5 minutes but after that, it seems a little cumbersome for this guy to keep using.

In fact, I had more fun with the S-Class Emulator.  Shown below, users can get the feel of the UI with a little more perspective than the desktop widget.  Seeing the widgets and such on a limited screen size makes more sense than small widgets on a large screen, perspective is a wonderful thing and to LG’s credit everything looks really nice on the emulator.

I am really digging the sliding rows option (hit the blue button in the bottom right) that allow you to group the apps by function and scroll through only those.  Compared to sliding through all your apps on the iPhone, this could save some serious time (though, I’ve taken to using the search function to find my a lot of my apps now on the iPhone and that seems to be a decent solution).  Overall, this UI is simple, rather fun and looks to work well for the average user.  LG is putting this S-Class UI on the Arena, Viewty, and Crystal phones.

You can play with the emulator below.  Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.  Enjoy!

Check out the emulator, widget and 3D games here: [LG]

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