Gadgetory

hey guys it's Brandon mini-myth from pocket now calm and we're excited to bring you with a review of SBB mobile shell 3d for Android let's get to it so this was previously known as SBB mobile shell 5.0 for Android it's been in beta for about a year available only to carriers and OEMs we did a preview of it a few weeks ago but this is the final version and they're calling it SPB mobile shell 3d for Android and it is awesome it's gonna be available soon by the time this video is available we'll have a better idea on pricing so we'll put an annotation up on the video so you know where to get it and for how much what we're talking about here is a complete interface replacement for Android that rivals and competes with ADW launcher and launcher Pro it's comprehensive it covers a lot of parts of the home screen experience and it's really well done and well thought out after a year of beta testing so let's talk about what we have here on its most basic level they are home screens eight of them although you can change that number that do certain functions and then does a lot more than that so that's kind of a minimal way of talking about it starting off here this is the clock pre-configured panel and from here we can see the time we can see the next lunar day we can tap to see the lunar calendar we can also change the skin of this particular pound so we've got a wide variety of clocks this blue clock is pretty cool and if we tap on it it will download it and bring it to the home screen and there you go a blue clock sliding to the right this is a miscellaneous panel we're not going to talk about this right now it's kind of a panel where you can put widgets and programs shortcuts and really anything you want to the right we have another miscellaneous panel but there's something cool here I want to show you as you can see here I've got some program shortcuts world time and this is a picture widget if you tap on the item on the left which has this 3d look we get this really cool 3d album where you can flick through your pictures in sort of a beautiful almost touch flow 3d like way and if you tap on the image you can bring it up full screen there so kind of a cool way to show off your pictures swiping to the right this is enough our built-in pre-configured panel it's just the calendar panel and what you have here are your next appointments you can add a new appointment there you can flick through your calendar to see the different dates and tapping on the calendar will bring up the Android calendar swiping to the right this is another pre-configured panel that we're talking about this is the flicker panel really cool way to actually change your wallpaper so let's say you tap on one of these this picture looks cool I want to make that my wallpaper you tap on it and boom within seconds you've got fresh wallpaper pretty nice and we've got a few settings we can change here we can have the pictures update automatically we can turn off the picture updates if it is not over Wi-Fi swiping to the right this is another miscellaneous panel and from here we can actually tap on this little picture here and get another one of these crazy 3d views this is of just your text messages this may not have that much utility to be honest it looks really cool but are you actually ever going to go into this view and flick through your text messages who knows let's go to the right this is another miscellaneous panel and there's actually one missing that I want to show you which I'll get to in a minute now to manage all of your panels what you do is you go into this view first and this is that 3d view we started the video off with and this is another example of somewhere that the 3d effect is awesome and it looks beautiful but it really has no utility why would you ever want to stay on your 3d carousel here and see these animations unless you're showing the effect to your friends so anyway we can tilt around we can spin it at a million miles an hour and get it to go very very fast sort of pointless down here we can manage our panels which is very useful so here's the weather panel that I left out that I want to show you from here we can kind of move around we can add new panels take certain ones away and we can also set the color of certain panels and select your default so let's say I want the weather panel to be the default I tap on it that click set is home I can also change the background color of the weather panel so let's make it red you'll see that it turns red so that when I go back to this view you get that red color okay so let's go to the weather panel this is one of those pre-configured panels it's the last one I wanted to show you it's the weather panel if you've got clouds or rain or something you'll see a really cool animation but when it's sunny you don't see anything like that and we can go through our forecast and move along like so another piece of functionality here if you take this little 3d button down there and slide it to the right or left it will automatically jump into this crazy 3d spinny view such as something to note also down here is a duck dock is very important so that no matter what homescreen you're on you always have the programs that you use the most by default SPB mobile shell will populate the dock with phone text messaging web which I changed and the program duck the program dock or the program tray it's very simple just as a listing of programs to change any of these it's very easy you tap and hold you get a little chooser here let's say I wanna have calendar B in the dock and boom the icon is replaced you've got calendar very easy to do there now let's talk about some of the kind of widget functionality there's something called edit mode and if you tap and hold on a particular widget you'll get a green arrow on anything that can be changed or configured so here we've got a green arrow if I tap on that it will change the look in the feel of that particular widget let's try to find some more green arrows here should be able to find a couple like for example here calendar so by tap on the green arrow it will expand to show me more information or it will collapse just to be an icon on the screen and a lot of other widgets will have this functionality so if we tap and hold here's the menu that we get and from here we can add more widgets we can add a program link just as simple as that or we can add an SBB widget a lot of these have different looks and feels to them so if we go to favorites here's a good example of a configurable changeable widget we get a green arrow we can tap to show my four favorite people or my 8 favourite people if there is enough room on this homescreen I could actually see 12 so if I remove flashlight and do this for 8 maybe not maybe there's only 8 inside of there another cool thing about mobile shell and what they do and I actually need to put a program or two on the screen here to show you that is that you get a little tray in the bottom that you can use to help organize your home screens so have you ever had the situation where you have a home screen full of icons and the only way to switch the order of two icons is to delete one move the other one and then add the other one back well with mobile shell you don't have that problem because you have this little waiting area this little dock on the bottom that you can drag programs or folders to and you can sort of keep them for later us whenever you're done organizing your home screens so let's take a look at the other mobile shell widgets that you can add they're kind of basic to be honest we've got the weather one which lets you switch between a wide variety of weather styles so if we just there's probably about five of them so really lets you change that and here's another cool feature you tap on this little grid you get this 3d view once again another example of where the 3d effect is really awesome but the utility is kind of low why would you want to ever look at your weather like this I mean it's backwards and obviously you're supposed to look at it more like this but the fact that it can rotate to a point that you can't even read what is going on in the particular widget it's just kind of a little bit silly it's a little bit fancy and it's it's very clear that SPB was trying to wow people with this and they did but they've kind of forgotten the utility in some of these areas so that's a pretty cool widget let's delete that off the screen and see what other widgets we can show you that come from SBB birthdays is pretty interesting we've got messaging calendar all of these system indicators really you even get your own SBB battery widget with percentages which is always good or you can add your own Android widgets let's say you've downloaded Android widgets from the marketplace for example and I've downloaded the battery you can use your good old Android widgets you don't need to use the ones that SPB have specified for you so if you're somebody that really likes eye candy you're going to love SPB mobile shell if you're somebody that likes things lean and clean without all of the visual fanfare and with lots of utility you might want to stick with launcher pro or ADW launcher it's really up to you really quick let's see how much program memory we're using right now on SBB mobile shell 3d so we'll go into the settings wherever that might be there it is and we're going to go to applications and here we are SBB mobile shell using about ten megabytes of of RAM that's actually not that bad launch a pro an ADW launcher come pretty close to that so it's not it's not going to SAP that much performance from your device SPB has done a good job with memory management so you can keep that in mind if you liked this video please give it a thumbs up and thanks for watching that's it for now