Mobile phones are the most personalized piece of consumer electronic gadget in the world. Ringtones, wallpapers etc have always been a way for user to make the device his own. But the mobile user experience has always lagged to provide that flexibility to the end user. The Ux has always been a set of philosophies which the phone manufacturers believed, were ideal for their end users with no flexibity to adopt it to their lifestyle or usage.

This is what we are trying to change with XPERIA panels. The person of the year according to Time magazine is ‘YOU’ , the end user. When we started designing the user experience for X1, our first objective was to provide the control back to User. Make a Ux that adopts or help end user adapt to different usage and experience important to him. The information an user can consume in a high end device like X1 (both from the web and phone) is enormous and the panel Ux enables user to consume that information in a easy,structured and most important in a way appropriate to his lifestyle.

The important piece of real estate in the phone is the DESKTOP. The information on this real estate has been determined/forced upon to the user by handset OEMs for years. Some OEMs have put shortcut to apps (this is a trend these days) ,some have put business info , some have put SEARCH . But as an end user the relevant information on desktop changes based on the time,usage and type of consumption.At work I need business info (calendar, emails), Shortcuts to apps when I need to access phone functions, SEARCH when I want to access web, Sports info with results of the days if I am a sports geek, monitor the social network activity if I am a SOCIAL BEING, monitor my EBAY bid if I am an active eBay user, updated concert event on my desktop if I am a concert freak, new videos updates from Youtube or access to todays news on your desktop when I wake up in the morning. As you can see the information relevant to different users at different instances are so varied and the Panel Ux was designed to power the user to pick and choose these experiences(Panels) on his desktop.Panels let user personalize the phone to an extent that has never been done before. The user can, with the press of XPanel key easily choose the relevant panels from his favourite 9 panels.From the hundreds of panels that user can install on his phone, he/she can choose 9 as his/her favorites.

This is the real 2.0 User experience for mobile phones in an era of convergence, of not only technologies but also phone usage.

-Ramanath@ Mountain view park.