Gadgetory

hey guys it's brandon minuman from pocketnow.com and this is the software tour of the mobi Nova ice there's a lot to talk about in this video so let's get started the first thing that I want to point out is all of the functions of this OLED screen you can't really see it until it actually turns on its 96 x 96 pixels and when it does turn on you'll probably see that it's flickering but it's actually not flickering right now just that the refresh rate is slower than the camera that is taking this video so the first function is kind of to act as a system notifier so if i press this button on the side a camera button which is kind of weird that they made it the camera button we will get this and basically it tells us the time battery life whether we have a cell phone signal and right now the sim card is out so there's no signal and i also tell you that you have a new message down below here and that's really all you can do with it you can't tap on it to bring up an email or anything like that the purpose of the screen in this case is just to give you some system notifications now the other two case this is that one it will act as a d-pad when you turn on the phone and you get a little bit of haptic feedback when you press on a button and it's actually very weird and kind of cumbersome to use the d-pad because it's completely flat so you have to look at it each time and another problem is that the the soft keys and the d-pad are so far away from each other that you're moving your thumb around a lot and I really try to avoid using the d-pad if possible in the third way that this OLED screen is used is for new message notification so if you get a new email you'll get a picture of an envelope that fills up the entire screen and kind of like a brownish color although oddly this shows up mostly when you turn off the device and you have a new email which is strange because if you have a new email you'd want to see the notification right when you turn on your device not when you're turning it off oh well so let's take a look at the rest of the device here so the screen is 400 down and 240 across but not really you get this unchangeable row of icons that you cannot alter or adjust this is kind of reminiscent of early palm devices or even the apple newton that gives you kind of a launcher various applications and system settings so basically what you're stuck with is AQ vga screen which is a very last generation resolution making things on the screen appear very grainy and pixelated it's unfortunate that this device doesn't take advantage of this space down here that said let's talk about how mobile Nova has used the space down here so if I tap on the first one says telephone it will go into the mobi Nova interface and what we can do here is if we tap on phone it takes us right to our our phone and this is the skin for the phone the screen is small and it's hard to type the the buttons on the screen it's best used with a stylus not very touch friendly we can go to mobi friends which is actually pretty cool it gives you a circle of people that you call often so if I tap on this person it will bring up different ways to contact this person so I can send them a text message and email do a voice call remove it's a really great way I think to to access different ways of communicating with someone if we go to contacts will obviously go to contacts standard windows mobile thing call history and voice died now if we go to the right we are taken to the next icon and let me go back out and show you that we just go right over to applications so that does the same thing and from here this is just a program launcher really so we can go into email or SMS or anything like that and we can go back again or I could have swiped my finger to the side and if we go into multimedia we've access to things like the camera FM radio and the cameras having trouble focusing because it's a weird kind of a contrast there if we go into settings we can change some settings if we go into sound we stay within the mobi Nova interface here and we can adjust the system volume or turn on ring or vibrate we swipe our finger to the right we will go to connectivity and here you can turn on phone or Wi-Fi this is kind of like a sequinned Communication Manager really go to the right again and here is the display settings from here we can adjust the backlight or we can leave it on auto I'm going to put it on manual there and if we go one more to the right we get some system settings we can turn on and off mobi feel which is the haptic feedback may be a good idea to turn this off because it'll help with battery life and as we'll see in the final review the movie Nova ice doesn't have the best battery life unfortunately and that that's really the end so let's go back back again and then we'll go over to this last one that says today which brings us to the mobi Nova today's screen or it's actually a kind of a program and this is what it looks like so what we can do is we can tap on this big clock and we can get multiple time zones so we can set different cities and we can add a city if we press that button so I'm going to go go back there oops if we tap on the calendar here we will obviously launch into the calendar if we tap on whoops got out of that if we tap on the email icon we will obviously go into email and if you've missed cause it will show up here as well but I like to stay in the standard windows mobile today screen which mobi Nova has at customized just a little bit you get this row of contacts and if you tap on one of the people it will take you into that screen that I showed you earlier where you can quickly dial certain functions of certain people so it's nice that Moby Nova tried to kind of customize the windows mobile interface but I don't think this was the best way to do it I think this is kind of a crude interface that doesn't look too visually pleasing and I really hate the fact that you can't remove this you can't disable these buttons and there's been so many times that I've tried to touch a soft key button here and I've accidentally pressed one of these buttons below that's a that's another big problem with this device so that said let's drill into the programs i want to take out the stylus to do this and here we go so we have standard programs here if we go into the control center that is actually going to be that that's that program that we went through earlier where it shows you the settings on the device that you can do through that interface we also have FM radio and you can't really do much with that unless you've got a pair of headphones connected and you saw the the d-pad flicker on their mobile friendly with the kind of rotary way of communicating with people going down the list standard stuff world time we were in there before world weather let's tap on that and see what that looks like and you can list the the weather for a city although of course I don't have a data connection right now because my sim card is not in and you can flick back and forth to multiple cities so nice little integration there you also get Microsoft Office suite and let me show you the on-screen keyboards while we're in there so I'm going to go to word mobile now unfortunately you only get one on-screen keyboard option beyond the standard windows mobile keyboards you know HTC devices have three they've won the t9 style one is the suretype style like as you see here and what is the full qwerty that said I actually really like the shirt up keyboard because the way the device is designed when you type you're actually resting your fingers right in the center of the device whereas with some other similar devices you're typing down here which is kind of awkward so it's kind of easy to to type so the day is Thursday and I really not had any problems with typing with this keyboard that said if I want to type in a web address in the web browser for example it's really impossible to use this because it's trying to use t9 so I have to always refer back to the you know the stylist tap tap keyboard here because there are no other keyboard options available that are big enough for me to use with my thumbs so wish there were more on-screen keyboards included on the mobi Nova ice now this device does have an accelerometer that said it only works in certain screens and I've only found two so far that it works in so if I flip it now it will not rotate but if I go into pocket Internet Explorer and by the way there's no better browser included that said you can always download opera mobile 9.5 or sky fire or something like that it will work in this screen there it goes and the icons kind of reorient themselves but the text does not which is kind of weird so you have to turn it this way to read the text it would be nice if the accelerometer worked in all screens and finally let's drill into settings and see what we have there anything interesting so if we go into the day option we can turn off the mobi plugin is that one you saw with all of the pictures of frequently called people there is no way to turn off these buttons and I've been in the program and I've talked to the company there's just no way to do it unfortunately I think that's a big problem for those that don't want these icons on the bottom to take up extra screen space so here we are in system and we can go down take a look at memory I have a bunch of programs open it has 81 megabytes of program memory available which is ok not so great finally if we go into connections we can go to the wireless manager to see what that looks like and we saw this earlier this device does have the bands necessary to do hsdpa in the United States I'm using AT&T and I get hsdpa signal over this device so that is good and that's pretty much it for the settings so overall I think the movie Nova ice has a lot of usability issues starting with the oled screen it's completely flat it's difficult to use you can't feel for it its functionality is quite limited you can only use it as a d-pad system notifier and it will show you when you have a new email things like that and I think it's taking a toll on battery life unnecessarily I mean you're powering two screens here when you could just have a standard d-pad have it be easier to use and not take up that extra battery life in addition this application launcher while it's useful sometimes and I applaud movie Nova's effort to kind of bring this new interface you can't remove it and it really gets in the way when you're trying to operate the phone and trying to use a soft key you're accidentally pressing these all the time which really is is quite annoying and finally the screen is low resolution basically what you have at the end of the day is a qvga screen and all new windows mobile devices that are coming out at least the ones that i can think of immediately have a high resolution screen above this making for a clearer image so i think those three things really take a toll on the usability of the mobi nova ice which is a shame because it has otherwise nice hardware the performance is good and it has a lot to offer in terms of the wireless radios that it includes in the FM radio and everything like that but we'll have the full take on this coming up in the full review or we'll talk about battery life pros and cons and everything like that so keep it to pocketnow.com for the full review of the mobi Nova ice that's it for now