Tabs are useful for the end user to rapidly change between different views. The following smartphone example application shows how to use the tab control classes in Symbian OS UIQ: CQikTab, CQikTabGroup, CQikTabScreen and CQikTabScreenPage.

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An individual tab can have a text, an image or both. The recommended procedure is to use a descriptive text and an icon only when there is no ambiguity about the meaning of the image.

In this example, a tab screen is embedded in another tab screen. This is a convenient method that makes it possible for the user to select a large number of tabs. For example, if a tab page with 4 tabs each contains 4 sub-tabs, this will result in 4x4 = 16 different tabs that can be reached by only two smartphone screen taps for the two levels of tabs. With three levels of tabs with 4 tab pages each, this will be 4x4x4 = 64 different tabs reached by three screen taps.

However, each tab level takes up a large area of the screen, so two or three levels should only be used occasionally. It is also important to group the different tabs logically. If there is no natural grouping, several tab levels should not be used.

The screen shots below show the running application:

Two tab levels	Two tab levels	One tab level

More information can be found in the SDK documentation at:
UIQ 2.1 SDK / UIQ SDK / C++ / UIQ API Reference / UIQ Specific Controls / CQikTab