@Charlie, Re: Innovation?
I saw this and thought "Nokia" too. Both from Windows Phone, and the Harmattan/Swipe UI of the N9 and the new Asha phones.
The slide-in control panes, on-off toggles, messaging UI, and the toolbar controls are straight out of Nokia's Harmattan/Belle/Asha UI, which stem from the Harmattan UI of 2011's N9. The rest is remarkably like WebOS. Incidentally, there's a theme here: Peter Skillman, once lead designer of WebOS, now works at Nokia and did the lead design on N9 and the Asha 501.
Icon design is an improvement, but I think the use of layout grids looks neat, but will make the icon shapes too regular and indistinct from each other (think of how tiring it is to read those typefaces that are constructed on rigid gridforms). I also think that Apple have missed a trick by not using key colours to subtly bind core apps together into function groups, as Nokia do (reference: http://www.developer.nokia.com/Resources/Library/Asha_UI/#!style/colour.html ).
The problem with this kind of icon design for third-party app devs is that it's deceptively difficult to do. A bit of photoshop monkeying can hide a poorly drawn design with surface treatment and patterning, but a flat, typographical UI exposes bad draughtsmanship mercilessly. Windows Phone suffers from this, and now Apple are putting their devs in the same boat. I foresee an uptick in sales of Adobe Illustrator... ;)
Also, looking at the icons in this UI particularly, I suspect Jonathan Ive may have some level of colour-blindnes - like his other work, it uses "colour" as a decorative element (and it works well in the selected icon highlight), but there appears to be little thought given to colour harmony: the icon colours are bright, but they clash with each other. On his hardware designs, there was only ever one bright accent colour, and I think he should have stuck to this for the icon sets.
So, who else contributed? Well, I think they lifted the most of the new phone UI from Microsoft, the task-switch UI from WebOS, and the use of a single UI "mood" colour (and drawing it from the wallpaper image) is from Jolla's "Sailfish" OS. I don't see much Android in there, tbh: what there is that's similar is just stuff that was lifted by both Apple and Google from WebOS. Imitation, flattery, etc.
Oh, and the use of Helvetica Light for black-on-bright text is a usability mistake. It looks "clean and sharp" if you've 20/20 vision, but if you don't, or if you suffer from any degree of astigmatism, the legibility degrades badly due to halation (glowing) of the surrounding white areas obscuring the letter strokes. Windows Phone does use thin type, but predominantly as light-on-dark, where halation "thickens" the strokes, improving legibility. (An example of this phenomenon, known since the late 1950s: UK road signage uses a heavier weight of type for white-backed signage than for the green or blue signs to reduce this effect).
Tab UI for Safari is nice, and as far as I can see is the only new bit of UI in the whole mashup. However, at least the iPhone's UI matches the device now.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
