Exclusive: an early look at Intel’s own phone UI, “Obsidian”

Intel is planning its own UI overlay, codenamed “Obsidian,” that it will bring to the mobile operating system Tizen and possibly Android. A source working at Intel has tipped Ars with several early screenshots and some video of Intel’s Obsidian project, which includes a handful of unique UI touches.

Tizen, a mobile operating system backed by the Linux Foundation, Samsung, and Intel, has yet to ship on any physical devices. Samsung announced that it plans to launch Tizen devices later this year, mainly in Eastern markets. Intel's Atom chips have also made appearances in a handful of Android phones and tablets, but the company has yet to publicly announce further Tizen devices.

From what we see in the materials passed to us, it's still fairly early days for Obsidian, and it's not quite feature-complete yet. The UI overlay appears to use very boxy, closely packed icons that mirror the flatter designs of Windows Phone and Android over the skeuomorphism of iOS. Three buttons are persistent along the bottom of the screen (phone, messages, and people), which our source says are not analogs for hardware buttons that come later but soft keys.

The UI also makes use of a rotation to alert users to notifications. Rather than pop bubbles over an icon, the UI rotates the icon 45 degrees and displays a red notification in the bottom corner to differentiate it from the rest of the apps. The diamond element also crops up to display things like contact info.

Shown in the first video, the lock screen has the usual slide-to-unlock, and displays “Life magazine” text (the exact same lock screen was present in Samsung’s reference Tizen device at MWC 2013). The app screen and contacts screen also appear to be connected in an unusual way, allowing the user to swipe into a single contact screen to the left, then to a contacts list even further to the left, with the “apps” pane two swipes to the right.

Shown in the second video, opening most apps including the clock and settings starts a quick-view pane along the bottom of the screen. A button to open the app in full is at the very bottom of the screen.

The Obsidian UI will run over Tizen 2.0, though the development team has yet to lay hands on the new version to give Intel handsets a consistent look, our source says.

The Intel reference device that will get the Obsidian UI first is codenamed Josephine. The original “development-ready” date for the UI was set for July, but earlier deadlines have since slipped. As Intel has made no official announcements regarding Tizen releases and has said nothing about developing its own UI, we can’t be sure when, or if, we’ll actually see the Obsidian beast in the wild.