Design

ZenZui: Microsoft’s Zoom-Based Mobile UI

In the far eastern lands of Redmond comes a new start up called ZenZui. It’s for your mobile phone and it’s a different way of accessing your information and media from content providers. Developers also have have a way to build applications to reach out to the public. For what? It could be games, RSS feeds, or multi media visualizations. Who knows, I’m just guessing.

Backed by Microsoft with patented MSR technology, this mobile widget shows off a zoom based interface. Think of it like a bunch of tiles and you can slide left, right, up or down. You can view 32 (6×6) of these tiles or zoom down to 4 on a screen (2×2). Depending on the type of phone you have, you can slide and zoom by touch screen or by the key pad. You can see from this video from the site:

We won’t have control over the kind of information that we view because these are sponsored spots. Companies on board are mostly advertising and media companies that will give you stuff like the Family Guy and useful information like traffic and airfare. This isn’t the first example of this zoom-based grid tile interface, but it is a sign of where mobiles may be heading.

I like it. I just hope they will allow us to be able to select what tiles we want to display and browse through.

ZenZui