[General Topics] chrizzled:
As an Android nut and graphic/industrial/UI designer I've been thinking a lot about this recently, and just had to get it off my chest. Here goes:

UI styling should be about the content, not the interface. Glossy elements just distract from their actual content. There should be a move away from what Apple does with iOS (emulating analogue elements digitally) towards what Microsoft did with WP7. WP7 showed that you can have an interface without any sort of shininess/gradient or analogue elements and still have it be completely usable and beautiful at the same time.

But what I'm really interested in is the future of Android. Gingerbread was a great step ahead in terms of UI styling. But I wonder what we will see when Sense UI, Motoblur, TouchWiz etc. are updated to 2.3? Sense is notorious for faux glossiness and TouchWiz is notorious for being plain ugly. Will WP7 and Gingerbread help these companies realize that the trend is moving away from iOS-eque styling and towards WP7-esque styling? Or will they continue to blindly copy iOS and ignore Google's attempts to beautify Android? My guess is that they will eventually catch on, but it might take a while. Perhaps if WP7 takes off and commands a decent market share these companies will take notice. We've already seen previews of Sony Ericsson's 2.3 TimeScape skin and LG's 2.3 whatever-it's-called skin and they both appear to have abandoned Gingerbread's gradient-less notifications bar and title bar and replaced them with gradients. Too bad.

Also, what will Honeycomb bring? We've now seen previews of the tablet version, and I can see many 2.3 styling cues in 3.0. One thing I noticed though is that it uses blue as the 'accent color'. Gingerbread strongly reinforced orange as Android's accent color so I wonder why they would change this. What I'm hoping is that the accent color can be changed- it's certainly plausible, as the accent color seems to play a huge part in the Honeycomb previews I've seen. Or perhaps phones will remain orange and tablets will be blue? It seems like a strange differentiation.

Hints at UI change in the phone-version of Honeycomb include new text-entry fields (looks like the Android keyboard spacebar symbol but stretched), a new look and swiping interaction for tabs within apps (seen in the leaked Music 3.0 app, the 2.1 News and Weather app and the new YouTube app), and like I mentioned, color accents everywhere. Videos of Honeycomb show pop-ups, scroll bars, loading rings/bars and menus featuring the glowing blue accent.

What I'm wondering about is this 'UI overhaul' that everyone is talking about. Is it going to be mostly visual like the stuff I mentioned above or is it going to completely change the UI paradigms of Android? I think a huge change in UI akin to the WM6.5 > WP7 transition would alienate a lot of users and break a lot of apps. Therefore I'm thinking 3.0 is going to be a few tweaks to the interaction part of the UI, but a huge change to the visuals. I predict they will update almost all of the core apps to match the graphics we are seeing in 2.3 and 3.0, to finally put to rest those complaints that Android looks 'hacked together'. The changes in 2.3 were probably a catalyst, to get developers thinking in this new design language. Google needs a name for it, just like WP7 'Metro'. After all it's up to the developers to make apps that match this style.

I'm a Nexus fan and would never buy a phone without stock Android so maybe this is just me dreaming of an end to carrier/manufacturer skins, but what do you think?