Before the Apple iPhone came out, there had been a growing emphasis on improving the Windows Mobile user interface. While it sported a familiar look to your desktop, it proved to be challenging for new users to use, and can be difficult to use on smaller screens, such as the current crop of Windows Mobile phones. Spb, tackled this challenge and introduced it’s Mobile Shell 1.0 on February 6th 2007. It provided a new, finger friendly way to navigate your Windows Mobile device. Now, with the release of Version 2.0, can Spb improve upon their already easy to use application? Read on for the thorough review!
INTRODUCTION
Spb has made some nice enhancements to Mobile Shell 2.0. The most important is the addition of the tabbed window. The features of this tabbed window include:
WHAT’S HOT
- In addition to the familiar Now screen, Spb has added an Spb Menu page and a Speed Dial page
- Replaced the Windows soft keys with four thumb sized icon to access these pages
- Added gesture support to change navigate to each page
As with previous versions of Mobile Shell, installation was straightforward. You will notice that Mobile Shell does not give you the option to install to a memory card. It automatically installs itself straight to your device to ensure reliable operation. I installed Mobile Shell on to my AT&T 8525 on both Windows Mobile 5.0 and then Windows Mobile 6. One of the things Spb has been able to do is reduce the amount of RAM needed to run the application.
SETUP
The figures shown in the chart are the actual RAM amounts on my 8525 with just Mobile Shell 1.5 and 2.0 installed. As seen above, Spb has been able to do is reduce the amount of RAM needed to run the application on both WM5 and WM6.
This chart shows us graphically how much Spb had reduced the memory footprint. Definitely a great job by Spb.
PRODUCT FEATURES
As I showed in my video first look, there are two new additional screens as well as some enhancements to the Now screen. In this review, I will be focusing on the enhancements that Spb has made to Mobile Shell since Stephen Skarlatos’ reviews of
version 1.0
and
version 1.5
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