Gadgetory

this is ray Duan with pocketnow.com with a quick look at today I'm going to give a quick run-through asian works first just want to let you know that I am running the application on my 18 d tilt and using a Wi-Fi connection so if I tap on the Z here starts the application of the first thing you'll see is this message to zoom out you see kind of a reminder of how the application kind of works once it goes through that you get this end users license agreement you only get this the first time you start up the application so I just accept it and you brought into the sign in screen a few things I don't like about the sign in screen is one year on-screen keyboard obscures the view of your password field so in order to see it you minimize your screen and there you can see it but the run you run into another problem your option for your soft input panel your on-screen keyboard disappear there's no way to tap on the screen to get back to it unless you either one tap on the on the one of the fields but that caused this proved problematic because you can't see what you're typing so what I'm going to do here is I'm going to take off my tilt off of the cradle i'm using and you can see we can sign in here but there's another problem i don't like about this is when you type in your password it actually shows all the letters that you've typed in and then zoom in here see if you can see that so it doesn't obscure it with the normal asterisks like most other applications do that's problematic for me just because of security concerns someone could look over your shoulder and see a password you're typing not that most people would but again it's just a security concern I have so I will be right back in a second I'm going to sign into sumo be and continue with the demonstration so now I've logged into sumo be and what I didn't show you was how long it took to actually log in for the first time which is about 30 to 40 seconds part of that was because it was a first time login it was downloading the content into each of the tiles subsequent logins won't take as long so now we see the 16 tiles here across the screen and in between every four tiles or quadrant there's a center tile which actually zooms in to show you a larger view of each of the individual tiles if you are using a non-touchscreen device you can use the one the 37 or the nine key in your keypad to zoom in or you could also use a d-pad same with the touchscreen devices and on the touchscreen devices you can just use your finger to zoom in one of the things I didn't like about this was each of these individual tiles looks like another finger friendly size but tapping on it doesn't bring you to that individual tile just brings you into this zoomed view so for touchscreen device users that just means an extra step for you to get to your content my my opinion kind of a poor choice and usability here so here we've got into one of the quadrants and you can see for larger views of the tiles and in the center is another tile which is used for navigation if you are using your keypad you can use the 13 the seven or the nine to access the individual tiles or you can use the two four six or eight to move into one of the other quadrants the Z button there will actually just zoom you out to the main screen across the button we have a inbox key a menu key and a help screen key the inbox in the menu kind of bring you to the same area sorry if I tap on the inbox it just brings you to this and here you see your inbox and in this inbox these are tiles that you've sent to yourself either from Zoo movies website or tiles you've sent from zoo mobi itself or tiles that your friends may have sent you scrolling to the right we have a deleted box which is tiles that have been deleted after replacing them with new tiles on the main screen you have also featured tiles by this Moby staff you have an options key here to update your data manually or to exit the application and then here you can access the help screen which just helps you navigate the the application to get out you just tap this X key here and we're back to this view so if I tap on one of the individual tiles for example here the Associated Press's international news will get some contents like the new news for the day and if i use my d-pad or the scroll wheel i can pick one of the articles so I'm going to pick this article here and it just gives you a quick peek at what the news article is about again you can use your scroll wheel or your d-pad to read the article to get to other articles you can either use the left right arrows at the top or if you use your d-pad and then across the bottom you'll notice a banner ad a sponsor key and unlabeled 82 key and a rate tile key tapping on the event the banner ad the 8th or the seven actually i'll do the same thing it just sends that tiles information or that Bay that sponsors information to your inbox so you can add that tile to your your screen if you want to why they need it three of these I don't know I think they could have used it for something different something I also take notice of is the rate tile key this just lets you rate the towel if you know how much you like it and then the other thing I noticed was the windows soft keys don't do anything here so it's again just a poor usability design here the ok button doesn't do anything it just actually brings up the start menu which kind of surprises me and actually clicking the start menu button doesn't minimize it you actually have to tap it on the screen p is the Z key it just zooms you back out now if you want to replace content you actually just go back to your menu here and I'm going to go back to the inbox as you can see this application actually takes a while to just navigate through the screens which again makes it makes it a little difficult to use on a daily basis but let's go to my inbox and there's some tiles here and let's just say if I'm interested in looks like this one's called ap strange so if I tap on it gives you a quick quick quick synopsis of what it is just says ap strange news and if I want to add it I just click Add and then I have to choose a title to replace that I don't want to use you can use your keypad or you can just tap on one of the icons here I'll just tap it right here I'm actually tapping on it doesn't work you actually have to just use the center button on your d-pad again another poor usability is a design here and so now it's been added to the screen as you can see actually takes a while for it to load that information on so if i zoom in here I now have AP strange news overall this seems like an interesting design but the slowness of the interface and just some of the design features just don't make it easy to use so this has been raved wand with a quick look at ads and mobi