Gadgetory

hey guys it's brandon minimun from pocketnow.com one of the biggest changes to windows mobile 6.1 was the addition of this sliding panel interface that they added to non touch screen devices like the blackjack the blackjack to the motorola q 9h it was really great because it kind of brought out all of the the programs and the functions that you would do on your device and have to dig through the start menu and put it right on your main screen so from here you can check if you have new voicemail new messages you can see your next appointment you can set up email work with songs and messaging look at photos and change your profile right from one screen and it was fantastic and one of the biggest complaints was that Microsoft didn't bring this to touch screen devices well there's a company called s hbt out of Hungary that has created an interface for touchscreen devices that is very similar to the sliding panel interface that is on windows mobile 6.1 standard and I'm going to show it to you now okay so let me take you through this and I should mention that this will work on any windows mobile touchscreen device as long as you have a cue vga or VGA screen so it won't work on the xperia x1 or a device like the LG insider samsung omnia so anyway we've basically two elements here we have the windows mobile 6.1 sliding panel interface and then we have the kind of windows mobile seven leaked screenshot look down here this is what it looked like in the leaked screenshots of 7 and let me take you through this so we start at the top here and we have it says home panel it has my name the date and the time if I go to the right I get the weather panel and if I click in word on the weather panel I'll get kind of an extended forecast kind of thing and this weather panel is actually an extra that you have to pay for so it's it's about five euros which comes out to about eight or nine dollar so it may not be worth it to you to have that we go over to the right and we have the media player so we can kind of watch the tracks that we're playing if we go down one level we have the same notification area that we had in windows mobile 6.1 standard but unfortunately I can't just tap right on to outlook it just goes right to that panel or that the sliding panel so I can go to the right and I can see any voice messages I have or text messages or outlook email of course I have none of that I can go down and we have the same exact appointment a panel that we do on the standard devices so we've next appointment here tapping on this will take me to the calendar if I close out of that I'll go back into there and if we go to the right we can make a new appointment I'm going down here we can change the profile and you actually get into a different interface that's custom to this program we can turn on vibrate or normal we can actually turn the backlight on or off to save power we can soft reset right from here so a nice little addition and if we filter this to the right we see wireless manager bluetooth is off Wi-Fi is on ringtone we can change the ringtone theme settings and this is actually a little bit unique because this is kind of the the settings for the program so we can determine whether there is a left softkey or right softkey if we actually go back to the today screen so let me go back to the day screen I left it blank here just so it wouldn't hog up memory and here are the two soft keys that I've set for the program and here we are back in there if I go to options I can change the theme to a variety of colors or are they actually have different skins that you can get from the website and there are some other things here like click events and and some some more advanced things that you can play with so I'm going to go to close here and I don't want to save the changes and i'll go back into the interface ok so let's continue downward if we go to the bottom most section we get kind of a program launcher and we can click on photo it'll take a store camera settings will go right into settings and so on and so forth if we get all the way to the bottom if we press on this center button we actually open the start menu which is pretty convenient if we press exit we're back into the standard windows mobile interface and if we press on my home we get back into that and one final thing to note what happens when we slide open the keyboard on the touch pro well it doesn't really work too well it doesn't scale to landscape unfortunately but I really think that this is made to be used with of course it's all messed up right now it's made to be used with one hand if you're walking down the street and you want to quickly access your messaging you kind of use the d-pad with one hand they don't expect you to use both hands and open it up like so I think that's kind of the premise behind my home so what do I think of this well it doesn't have the bust NIST of spb mobile shell so it doesn't give you access to internet favorites and multiple programs it's not as customizable nearly as customizable as spb mobile shell but again as I've been emphasizing through this video I think this is a really good solution for those who want someone handed usability back in windows mobile touch screen you can do everything pretty much from the d-pad and you can see your missed calls and your missed messages and and your next appointment really quite easily from this pretty intuitive interface but again it's twenty-six dollars and that may not be worth it too so that's it for now on my home from sh BTW i'll post links on pocketnow.com on how to get it that's it for now