I saw on Neowin and from this discussion over at Channel 9 that the UI as seen in build 5270 will be the final UI for Windows Vista. It appears that many seem to be disappointed since they thought the UI so far was just a placeholder similar to the Watercolor theme when Windows XP was in beta.

In the Neowin article above, it seems that Microsoft developers have confirmed that the UI for Windows Vista as seen in build 5270 will be the final one and that there will be no major changes. However even Microsoft developers don’t have all the details all the time when it comes to the Windows UI.

And when you take a look at this video of the recording session for Windows Vista sounds, you’ll notice that they tell Robert Fripp, who is doing the sounds, to think of blue and green colors, in fact “plenty of green and blue.” I don’t know about you, but I haven’t really seen a lot of green and blue up till now in the beta builds for Windows Vista. So far everything seems to be shades of gray and black.

So I doubt that what we are seeing of the UI now, at least as far as the colors go, is final. What we see now in the beta builds might be the Watercolor theme for Windows Vista. The appearance of the final UI certainly with regards to the colors will probably resemble this picture which was used when Windows Vista was announced. I suspect that most of the icons in the beta builds are final though.