Yesterday, I visited the Nokia offices in Helsinki, Finland and had the opportunity to look at the latest range of handsets and technologies being developed. While there are no groundbreaking announcements to make and no fuzzy spy pictures to share, I did get a video of a mad pet project (no pun intended!) of some Nokia team members.

The N800, a large touchscreen internet tablet, was released some eight months ago and this has to be my favourite use of it so far.

The robot dog is controlled via another N800 tablet and has a range of predefined actions it can do. Great fun!

I came across this quote this morning and find it rings very true. We’ve all experienced some great and some very poor User Interfaces on the web, at the cash machine, on our mobile. Things just get far more complicated than they need to be. Nelson Minar highlights how the iPhone takes a step towards simplicity.

While the sleek touchscreen defines the iPhone’s design, one of the things I like about it are the simple mechanical buttons on the side. There’s a dedicated volume rocker which instantly makes the iPhone a better music player than any iPod. But even better is the silent mode switch, an old fashioned mechanical two position switch. Slide it away, feel a satisfying click, and your phone is now in silent mode. There’s even an orange dot visible for visual confirmation.

You can measure the disaster of cell phone UI by how many button presses it takes to silence the damn ringer. My first Nokia phone took 2, the Ericsson took 3, and on the RAZR it’s like 17 button presses. You don’t need silent mode often, but when you do you need it quickly and without a bunch of screen reading distraction. The physical switch for that is lovely.

What can you do today to simplify the process your users go through?

[From Nelson’s Weblog via Merlin Mann at 43Folders]