I am really on the fence about this one. (I commented on these things before in another thread a few weeks ago, but figure it's worth mentioning again since the topic has come up.) On the positive side, the interface is excellent... really attractive. The Now screen has a lot of what I would like to see immediately and the launcher does just what a launcher should do.
My complaints are with some limitations in what the mini-apps actually do when you use them. I've installed this on an HTC Touch that already has the TouchFlo interface and the HTC Today screen application. Here are the things that I would have to give up to go to this shell.
1. An intermediate email screen when I choose to see my mail. The emails icon counts the number of unread emails. That's good. But with my HTC Today screen email counter, when I click on it, it opens Messaging to a summary page that shows how many unread emails are in each account. Then I can click on the one to be opened. (I have fou
r email accounts that I access through my touch.) In contrast, Mobile Shell takes me directly into the last email account I was in. So, say I was last in account C and I have gotten 30 emails in account D and none in A, B or C. The Now page will show I have 30 emails, but when I click on it, it takes me to C where there are no new emails. Oops, let's try A... no, no emails there. How about B? Nope, no emails there, they must be in D. Yeah, there they are. But what a pain to get there. How hard would it have been to have shown us the same screen that the HTC app launches? It seems to be part of Messaging, not the HTC application. The HTC approach is so simple and elegant and this is so useless if you have more than one account, that this is almost enough by itself to make me delete the program. (Still undecided, though.)
2. Limited Ringer Options. My Touch has a phone ringer setting called 'automatic' that automatically sets the ringer settings to 'vibrate' whenever a meeting is currently in my calendar and to 'ring' at all other times. That way, I never have that awful ringer interrupting a meeting because I forgot to turn my phone to silent or vibrate. It will also let me set it to ring, vibrate or silent. In contrast, Mobile Shell only has the ring, vibrate or silent settings. The phone supports the automatic option, but Mobile Shell does not, so I can't set it the way I want it via the Shell. It doesn't seen to be too much to ask that they give us all the WM6 options for the ringer.
3. No Task Manager. If the Now page is something of a UI default, which seems to be the idea, then how can you not put a basic task manager at the top in all that wasted space next to the battery and signal strength icons? Come on, just give us a simple icon that shows a drop-down list of running programs with an X to close any of them, and give us a close button, throughout the
system, that optionally lets us close apps instead of sending them to the background. The way it is now, in order to get to a running program, I have to close the shell, return to the today screen, and then use my other task manager. If this really is a shell, then make it a real shell and give us what we need to manage our programs.
4. Going to the Today Screen. It would be nice if there were a today screen option as one of the regular buttons at the bottom of the shell (where you currently choose from Now, Menu, Photo Contacts and Close Shell). Instead of making us close the shell, returning to the Today screen to get to the today plug-in (and others from different people), it would be much more elegant to make a Today page as a fifth icon at the bottom and to show those without leaving the Mobile Shell. Then it would really be a shell because you'd never have to return to the default (real) shell of the device.
Altogether, I really like the Shell. Both the weather app and the launcher page are excellent and I'm still trying to decide whether it's worth buying. If 1 and 2 above were solved, I wouldn't even hesitate, but right now, I have to run mainly my HTC interface just to get the functionality I need, and I just pull this down for the things it does well. It's almost there as an actual shell, but not quite.