How to: Speed your way around applications in Symbian Belle
23.02.12
You may remember my infamous little tutorial here: " Sometimes simple is best - using a single homescreen "? This very much went along with the conventional 'S60' system of hierarchical application menus being the principal way of accessing your content and applications. Accompanying this hierarchical menu system there was, traditionally, a 'homescreen', onto which status information appeared, along with a handful of shortcuts to the apps and bookmarks you used the most.
With the arrival of 'widgets', in S60 5th Edition on the Nokia N97, we then had a subtle enhancement of the homescreen concept, with Symbian OS passing control over those six little rectangles to the appropriate applications or functions. Now we had a homescreen that not only showed information, it was extensible and customisable in a way that we'd never seen before (on Symbian).
The idea proved popular and, spurred on by the increasing popularity of 'widgets' on competing Android smartphones, the number of homescreens was increased for Symbian^3 to three. This was a whole new ball game, with an ever larger chunk of smartphone functionality available without ever dirtying your fingers tapping into the main application menus. In fact, it was such a departure that I wrote the aforementioned 'keeping it simple' rant.
Source: All About Symbian