Rob Alexander
03-08-2008, 04:26 AM
I ran across the announcement of SPC Mobile Shell 2.0 on the front page a few days ago. It looked pretty good from the description so I downloaded it to try it out on my HTC Touch. I like the idea of the Touchflo interface that came with my Touch, but think it is pretty poorly implemented, so the idea of a nice, bright, polished touch-like interface was appealing. After a couple of days, my overall impression is that it is both brilliant and disappointing all at once. I'll elaborate.
The look of the interface is excellent and the design of the Now page does a great job of getting most of the information you need into an attractive, useful at-a-glance package. I also appreciate that they made the pages available with a gesture while you're using any program, and that they made the gesture top-down so that it doesn't interfere with Touchflo (which is bottom up). This means the two can co-exist. So kudos for an elegant, attractive design. It makes me really want to use it.
But it's not all good. It's the little stuff that they fell down on, but it's stuff that really makes the device useful. My complaints about the Now page include...
1) 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 page that shows how many unread emails are in each account. Then I can click on the one to be opened. (I have four email accounts accessed 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) This next may be a simple thing, but it's important to me. My Touch has a phone ringer setting called 'automatic' that uses the ringer most of the time, but automatically shifts it to vibrate whenever I am in a meeting according to the calendar. As a professor, that's really nice since I'm in and out of classes and meetings all day. Before, I would constantly forget either to turn it off before a meeting, or to turn it back on after. I assume this is a Widows Mobile thing and that all WM phones can do it. Would it have killed SPB to include that option in the ringer settings icon on the Now page? Yes, I know I can buy their phone suite to do a bunch of extra phone things, but I don't want a bunch of extra phone things, just the feature already built-in to my phone. It's unreasonable to ask me to buy an entire extra program just to get a feature that I already own (assuming that would even work).
3) 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.
The menu is visually well-done and reasonably customizable, but why not let me create my own sub-menus like the hard-coded ones they put in? As long as I can write a valid line what what to call in a sub-menu, why not go ahead and let me make one? Most other things about the shell are really nice. I really like the layout of the little weather applet... it shows just what I want to know at a quick glance.
One last suggestion. 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.
Anyway, there are my opinions. It is flashy and pretty and really nice and elegant to move around in, but it needs more ability to be customized and it needs to support the real needs of users beyond the flash. I'm still unsure whether I will buy it or not. If I do, it might be just to use it as a touch-sensitive launcher (i.e. use only the menu screen), but it's pretty pricey for just that.
The look of the interface is excellent and the design of the Now page does a great job of getting most of the information you need into an attractive, useful at-a-glance package. I also appreciate that they made the pages available with a gesture while you're using any program, and that they made the gesture top-down so that it doesn't interfere with Touchflo (which is bottom up). This means the two can co-exist. So kudos for an elegant, attractive design. It makes me really want to use it.
But it's not all good. It's the little stuff that they fell down on, but it's stuff that really makes the device useful. My complaints about the Now page include...
1) 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 page that shows how many unread emails are in each account. Then I can click on the one to be opened. (I have four email accounts accessed 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) This next may be a simple thing, but it's important to me. My Touch has a phone ringer setting called 'automatic' that uses the ringer most of the time, but automatically shifts it to vibrate whenever I am in a meeting according to the calendar. As a professor, that's really nice since I'm in and out of classes and meetings all day. Before, I would constantly forget either to turn it off before a meeting, or to turn it back on after. I assume this is a Widows Mobile thing and that all WM phones can do it. Would it have killed SPB to include that option in the ringer settings icon on the Now page? Yes, I know I can buy their phone suite to do a bunch of extra phone things, but I don't want a bunch of extra phone things, just the feature already built-in to my phone. It's unreasonable to ask me to buy an entire extra program just to get a feature that I already own (assuming that would even work).
3) 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.
The menu is visually well-done and reasonably customizable, but why not let me create my own sub-menus like the hard-coded ones they put in? As long as I can write a valid line what what to call in a sub-menu, why not go ahead and let me make one? Most other things about the shell are really nice. I really like the layout of the little weather applet... it shows just what I want to know at a quick glance.
One last suggestion. 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.
Anyway, there are my opinions. It is flashy and pretty and really nice and elegant to move around in, but it needs more ability to be customized and it needs to support the real needs of users beyond the flash. I'm still unsure whether I will buy it or not. If I do, it might be just to use it as a touch-sensitive launcher (i.e. use only the menu screen), but it's pretty pricey for just that.