E-TEN Glofiish V900 with Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional

    Most new Windows Mobile devices have some sort of interface replacement that covers up Windows Mobile (like TouchFLO, etc). In this case, E-TEN, like Toshiba on the G810, decided to use Spb Mobile Shell. We like Mobile Shell because it places all the most used functions of the device in a graphically pleasing interface that is on the screen every time you take your phone out of standby. From here you can see the weather, access SMS/Email, change the device profile, see your next appointment, and of course see the time and date.

The V900 has a built-in accelerometer which will rotate the display in any screen of the operating system. More on this later.

    To get to the second tab of Spb Mobile Shell, you can swipe your finger to the right, or press the icon on the bottom. Here is a customizable program launcher that features really neat animations to go the next screen. If we click Internet, for example...

...we are taken to this finger-friendly display that interfaces with Pocket Internet Explorer.

And in the third tab, you can make a grid of favorite people to call.

    Another really neat feature of Spb Mobile Shell is that you can quickly enter either of the three Mobile Shell panes by swiping your finger from the top to the middle of the screen...as seen here. You can do this from practically any screen in the OS.

SYSTEM SOFTWARE

    This is what the Today screen looks like out of the box on the V900. Very cluttered, indeed. You can, of course, cut down on the clutter by turning most of these items off through the Settings menu. The right soft key will get you back into Spb Shell, and the left one shows you speed dial.

This is what speed dial looks like, which will sort your calls by frequency. This is a very useful feature...the interface is simple and ugly, but useful.

Here in the index view, we can quickly get to a letter of a person we want to call.

And we can also adjust the color of this layout.

Speaking of dialing, this is what the phone application looks like. It's skinned in a cool brushed metal theme.

And take a look at the context menu - it is not touch friendly. On the HTC Touch devices, context menus are larger.

When someone calls, you get this pop up. The huge phone icon covers up the phone number! Bad design.

And when you're in a call, you get that same brushed metal theme.

The Call History screen is not skinned.

Ok, let's get into the Start menu, which is also not touch friendly. From here we can go into Office Mobile...

Where we see the usual entries. Let's go into Word and see the on screen keyboard options.

E-TEN includes just one keyboard option, called Easy Keyboard. This pales in comparison to other new Windows Mobile devices which let you choose between T9/SureType/QWERTY keyboards.

Huh?? What is this? Is this a QWERTY keyboard? The keys aren't even aligned correctly. But to be fair...

...flipping it into landscape allows you to see the correct keyboard layout.

Here we are in the Programs menu where we have several sub folders to go through. Note that the V900 includes Voice Commander, which is good, but not as good as Microsoft Voice Command. To start, we'll go into Multimedia.

We'll cover all of these entries except for Camera, which will be shown over on the following page.

This is the photo gallery, which is a pleasant deviation of the standard one for Windows Mobile.

When you enter a picture, you get a black background. You can swipe right or left to change the picture, but there is no easy way to zoom in (like double tapping, etc).

Pressing on the grid in the upper right corner, we get some options - we can email the picture, trash it, start a slideshow, etc.

And here we are zoomed in 200%.

The V900 can act as an FM transmitter to presumably broadcast music/etc to, say, a car stereo. Unfortunately, I could never test this feature. Every time I would change the band to USA, the application would exit! Even after numberous resets, the same thing happened. Rediculous.

And then we have the FM tuner. All WinMo devices that have an FM tuner make you plug in the headphones to get reception. But since the V900 had an external antenna, you can just pull that out.

The radio application will scan the airwaves to find the clearest stations. This worked very well!

I couldn't do much testing - or any testing - with the TV viewer, because we don't have T-DMB/DAB/DVB-T/DVB-H support in the US.

And finally, Namecard Manager is supposed to be a program that lets you snap pictures of text and business cards and have them converted to digital text - but it didn't work very well for me. The program was slow and difficult to use.

Further down the list in Programs is the Utilities folder.

    This is neat. When you first start up the V900, it asks you if you want to install...well, everything you see here. If you hit no, you can still go back, with the Application Recovery program, and reinstall items selectively. That's a good way to keep the device clean and not load it up with junk that E-TEN thinks you should install, but only what you find useful.

The backup utility is basic.

    Look at this! Because Windows Mobile devices' program memory gets full over time, you can have the V900 reset itself once a day to get a fresh start. At first I thought this was a silly idea, but after I reasoned that it may indeed be a good way to keep the device running fast, it made sense. Yikes, E-TEN should polish their included applications before deploying them. Look at that placement of the comma on the second part of the screen!

Flip on over the next page where we'll cover the interesting device settings, plus review the camera quality with sample shots.