I was looking forward to trying Moblin, the Linux-based operating system designed specifically with mobile devices in mind, but apparently, it’s pretty lacking in a number of areas.

The interface looks very sharp; it is mostly flat, 2d graphics with a few subtle, well done 3d shaded parts. I really love the flatter interfaces because they look especially clean. I personally use the Elegant Brit theme on my system. Moblin also uses a Clutter back-end to draw its interface. Clutter uses OpenGL to draw 2d graphics on 3d surfaces; this allows for some fancy animations which take advantage of the amazing computing power which is available on modern graphics cards. In addition to the interface looking handsome, it also functions a bit differently than a typical computer desktop.

Unfortunately, this is where Moblin falls down. JKKMobile published a video review which shows off these shortcomings of the operating system. The video is rather long, so I will discuss some of the points made.

I’ll start with the minor things. First, there seems to be a lack of configurability throughout the system. There is a web browser, but no configuration options. There is a list of recently used files on the home screen, but no way to modify the list (such as pinning down or removing items).

There are a couple of places where you click an icon to invoke a desired functionality, where it needs some information in order to complete the function (such as browsing to a website - it needs a web address). It should allow you to type this information in readily, however, it requires another click (in a textbox) before you can begin typing.

Now for the big problem: some serious user interface flaws. The main toolbar which you use to interact with the system (akin to Windows’ start menu or OS X’s dock) hides itself. To get to it, one must move the mouse to the top of the screen. “What’s wrong with that”, you ask “that’s the behavior I prefer: it saves space.” Well, it completely fails on devices with a touch screen! It is very difficult to activate that very top row of pixels on a touchscreen. It also gets in the way since the individual applications mostly have controls at the very top of the screen. When you try and click on a control, the Moblin toolbar pops up and you end up clicking on something you did not intend. But that’s relatively minor. If you want to have a laugh, skip ten minutes twenty seconds into JKKMobile’s video. The media player is just plain wierd. He clicks on an image, and thumbnails shuffle around. Then he clicks on the same image; they shuffle around again. The process continues until he finally gets to the image he wants to see. You have to watch the video to fully see just how wacky this thing is.

For an operating system designed around a user interface, it looks like there really wasn’t much thought put into the interface. It’s a shame because it seemed like it was going to be great. It is still in a beta phase, so there will be some changes before the final product. It’s possible that we’ll still end up with something good, but right now, it’s not of much use.

I would like to also point out a couple of aspects which are part of the Moblin project which are pretty interesting. It includes a data store called Mojito, which fetches items from the web and caches them locally. Examples of items it might fetch include photos from Flickr or your contacts’ updates from Facebook. Developers can write programs which use Mojito to work with the user’s web data. Another interesting data tool is Bickley, which is a metadata management system. This allows items on your system to have extra bits of data tacked on. For example, you might want to know how frequently you play a song or which contacts collaborated with a set of documents.